This blog is obviously socio-political satire and you would have to be a complete moron to take it seriously

Hello. My name is Jacques Tourdet, CEO of Lost Children of Suburbia, a 501c3 non-profit organization:

In the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan convinced an entire generation of parents that they didn’t have to take care of their children if they didn’t like them. Thus, for a variety of reasons, millions of suburban children were expelled from their homes and cut off from parental support at the tender age of 18. Some were cut off because they were practitioners of alternative lifestyles, and others because of political conflicts.

“It’s for their own good,” the parents said, “They’ll thank us later!”

Well, it has been 30 years since the 1980’s. These kids are now in their late twenties and early thirties, and it is clear that Tough Love was NOT for their own good. In fact, it seems as if Tough Love only benefited one party: Irresponsible conservative parents.

Take the story of Sandy Junkins, for instance:

Sandy was kicked out of his house at the age of 17 because his parents disagreed with his alternative herbal medicinal needs. Forced to live on the streets of New Orleans, Sandy soon became addicted to crack-cocaine. Within a few years of living on his own, he decided to end his own life.

Emergency Medical Technicians were able to revive Sandy from his Percocet and vodka induced slumber. But even though they were able to heal his body, they could never heal his psychological wounds. When Sandy’s parents came to visit him in the hospital, it wasn’t to apologize for their negligence as parents. It was to inform him that, due to his recent suicide attempt, they had decided to take out a life insurance policy on him, naming themselves the beneficiaries. I guess they figured that betting on their son’s demise was a good investment.

While Sandy’s wealthy conservative parents play golf, drive luxury cars, and eat caviar, Sandy lives in run-down tenements, sometimes eating cat food for supper, and smoking whatever he can find on the ground. He has been denied the opportunities that benefit those suburban children who choose to conform to their parent’s values. He has been denied the education, capital investment, political influence, and nepotism that his peers have gotten from their parents.

Cases like these may seem extreme to you, but here at Lost Children of Suburbia, we see them every day. Conservatives may disagree with abortion, but they have no problem aborting their support of their kids at age 18, after horribly scarring them with Christian neo-conservative brainwashing.

At Lost Children of Suburbia, we call this “The Psychopathology of the Suburbs”. What this means is simple: rich suburbanites think that if they put a brick wall up in front of the ghetto, then that ghetto doesn’t exist. That’s not taking responsibility. That’s called ‘living in a fantasy world’, AKA full-blown dementia.

Well, the rich suburbanites may not see you, hidden ghetto, but we do. Because here at Lost Children of Suburbia, we care about abandoned conservative children. A donation of as little as $5 could help children like Sandy afford healthcare, education, and weed.

My, how far the hippies have fallen. From a grassroots culture of social conscience and progressive direct action, to a materialistic, hedonistic community woefully dependent upon the economic class structure and resource wars. From Zion to Babylon.

Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly those modern hippie movements that honor the spiritual and political ideologies of the counter-culture’s origin. I’m especially thinking of the Occupy Movement, pretentious yoga hipsters who are obsessed with Eastern religion, and even the Rainbow Family. I have no problem with these old school or “classic” hippies. But more and more, the modern party scene tends to be dominated by these poser neo-hippies, frequently found in nightclubs and raves, grinding to lyricless EDM music, suckling the teet of the establishment or their suburbanite parents, often at the expense of their own karma, and having meaningless sexual relationships with strangers while liquored up and tweaked out on bathtub crank.

So there’s this co-worker I’m friends with. She actually lives in the co-op down the block from me, and we sometimes give eachother rides home when the need arises. She’s a very smart person, far more well-versed in web development than I, and even has her own chiptune band. She’s one of the most liberal people I know, and is even involved in a political lobbying group for the transgendered. When all the Burning Man hooplah came around again last year, I asked her what she thought of it, and she said, “Oh, those people have such a high level of privilege, it’s just ridiculous.” And I was like: “Thank you. I’m so glad there is another real liberal in this town, because, in the midst of all this Burning Man hysteria, I was beginning to think I was the only one.”

It seems as though what the Burning Man crowd has forgotten is that the counter-culture was built on a foundation of activism and liberal politics, not necessarily sensual pleasures like drugs, psychedelic music, and wanton sexuality. And certainly not materialism. All of that stuff was really supposed to be ancillary to the far more important causes of ending unnecessary wars, environmentalism, and fighting for equal rights and opportunity. So when did the spiritual, politically conscious, and socially conscientious hippies turn into hedonistic slaves to their own desires, co-opted by the fascist system?

We can trace this cultural rift back to the late 70’s and early 80’s. It was then that many hippies “sold out”, and became yuppies. They began to work within the system instead of in opposition to it, forming companies that owned health food stores and bottled water plants, and even ice cream companies like Ben and Jerry’s, whoring hippie culture, commoditizing nature, and becoming wealthy in the process. The people who remained politically militant during this time, abandoned the naive hippie idealism that had failed them in the face of both force and coercion perpetrated against their people by the establishment, and instead adopted the cynical realism of the punk movement. This was the split between those whose values were more important to them than their standards of living, and vice versa. The divide between art/culture that represented a meaningful struggle, and mindless, feel-good pop music. The underground and the system.

In the 90’s, there was a 60’s revival that brought forth a resurgence of liberal values, including classic counter-culture hippies, but it didn’t last. The more politically conscious wing of this movement were the alternative rockers, who were really just carrying the legacy of hardcore punks and anti-establishment hippies into the modern, mainstream spotlight.
The more superficial, materialist, and sensualist wing of the 90’s counter-culture were the ravers. These were the rich kids with “cool” parents, usually coddled and spoiled, and taught to indulge themselves. In other words, the kids who were raised by permissive liberals in stead of “Tough Love” Reaganites.

I remember the first ravers in the 90’s: They tended to be the children of wealthy suburbanites, who were extremely stuck up to people outside their social circles, but within their exclusive circles, were wildly hedonistic and outgoing. The idea I think, was that outside influence from the lower class would “corrupt” the culture, and eventually, it did. When the rave scene went mainstream in the early 2000’s, there was a general consensus of “there goes the neighborhood” amongst ravers, as the lower economic classes and people of color began to include themselves in the scene. And once mainstream America caught wind of what was going on at these parties, the legal crackdowns were not far behind.

And even as the EDM scene fights for legitimacy in the 2010’s, this attitude continues. It is common to see a very materialist, sensualist, and lasseiz-faire attitude amongst Burners and clubbers in the modern age. These are people who are liberal in the sense of being open-minded sexually and to the idea of drug use, but conservative in terms of social and political conscience. It would be more accurate to call them libertarians than true liberals. Even as they are more “liberal” than say, Richard Nixon, there is still a certain amount of racism, chauvinism, and classism in their world view. And any of those hedonists who would call themselves “liberal” are those who don’t understand there is more to being liberal than sluttiness and drug abuse.

And that is a big part of my problems with this culture: When beauty, materialist, sensualist self-indulgence, and popularity are prioritized over truth, justice, meaning, and real progress, you end up with a crowd full of over-privileged poseurs and superficial people being placated by bread and circus, mindless groupthinkers who are slaves to fashion trends.

The Flower of Life is a symbol you often see worn by neo-hippies who don’t really have any idea what it means. But this symbol is a sacred religious icon, and not a fashion statement. It represents probably one of the oldest religions on this planet. And although it is good that the sacred knowledge this symbol represents has become more popular and accessible, the symbol’s misappropriation by shallow hedonists and materialists is one downside to its resurgence in popularity, in the same way that the Christian cross‘s association with war and conquest is in contradiction to its true meaning. I think of this symbol as very similar to what the Yin Yang was in the 60’s: It was cheapened by Western hippies that turned it into a cheap sex joke, or a fashion statement only appreciated for its aesthetic value, with no acknowledgment of its deeper meaning.

As a newcomer to Austin, I remember seeking acceptance by the Burner crowd and having my pure intentions be ridiculed by a bunch of immature people. I noticed that the ‘hook-up culture’ was firmly entrenched in this community, and there were a bunch of people having these really shallow, superficial relationships in which they weren’t honoring, respecting, and truly loving eachother, but instead exploiting eachother, manipulating eachother with petty games, disrespecting eachother’s values, and generally treating eachother as objects, the women sex toys and the men ATM machines. A lot of the relationships I saw in this culture were more based in petty material or otherwise superficial concerns, rather than common destiny or being meant for eachother. And the whole thing really offended me. Finally, this fashion model/go-go dancer pulled me aside and said: “Hey, you know, I think your intentions are misaligned with 99% of the people here. Most of these people aren’t looking to find their soulmate or to save the world. They don’t have all these ideological concerns. They just want to get high and fuck in order to escape the dreariness of their humdrum, corporate lives.” This is coming from a woman whom many would consider “Queen of the Scene”. And that’s when I realized: These people are posers, and the flags they fly are false advertising.

The model/go-go I mentioned… I had a major crush on her little sister. When I met her, she was pristine, an angel. It is not my custom to pursue women, as I tend to avoid fool’s errands and wild goose chases. Still, I tried harder with her than I have ever tried with anyone. But she ended up in the hands of a bunch of other guys, and I was subjected to the misery of having to watch from the sidelines while she cruelly rejected me in favor of shallow popularity, materialism, and sluttiness. Now, she is no longer the goddess she used to be, but a mere prostitute, like so many others. In the time between now and when we first met, she has picked up a lot of bad karma, and it has aged her. I no longer have any desire to be with her, and my quest at this point is to find someone with a similar look, but with moral class, education, and a bigger heart.

And in the end, was the go-go blamed for playing games with my heart, and the hearts of many others? No, of course not! Because being a professional tease is considered “her job”, and anyone she manipulates and hurts is simply told to “quit being superficial”, even if they themselves are on the same level of beauty, and have traditionally dated those less beautiful than themselves. One of the agendas of the burner matriarchy is to marry the rich to the beautiful, a la Steve Rubell‘s Studio 54. If money isn’t a factor on either side of the equation, burner girls will simply try to get handsome men to hook up with overweight or ugly girls, often cock-blocking them from any other opportunity. The burner matriarchy is incredibly manipulative in the social games it plays at the expense of men.

I hate it when female chauvinist burners give me the advice, “Don’t pursue love, just let it come to you.” Because that advice is not applicable to a man. In fact, it’s not applicable to anyone. If everyone followed that bullshit wannabe Zen advice, no one would ever get with anyone. We would all just be frozen in place. As it is, women teach themselves and eachother to play “hard to get” because they know that the harder they are to get, the harder men will try to get them, and that will result in them reaping more benefits of courtship. Basically what I have learned is: don’t ever ask a Burner chick to set you up, because they never see the inherent worth of a man and try to find him an equal or who he truly deserves, instead, they try to hook one of their loser friends up with the best possible deal, either financially or in terms of handsomeness. Mind you, I don’t have a problem with feminism, I just hate inequality, gender roles, and ego games, all of which seem to plague the Burner social matriarchy.

The women in this scene are just Whores of Babylon. Gullible liars who rule their cliques with misinformation. The kind of women who obsess over weight and food in mock adherence to the Hindu religion, but completely ignore the idea of sexual karma. They seek out these naive computer nerds to take advantage of, having fake “relationships” with them that are merely “the girlfriend experience“. I’ve had two long-term relationships with burner girls that never worked out, because they go out to these parties and I can’t go because I have to work. Then they get approached by these douchebags and feminazi lesbians who keep reminding them, “You know he doesn’t OWN you, right?” The female component of the burner world is a matriarchal fashion-police of cultural bigotry that has become corrupted by the decadence of its most beautiful, rich, and powerful members. And when they get caught cheating they use the old “monogamy is selfish” rhetoric to justify it. But isn’t sexual conquest more selfish than monogamy, as it relies on continually conquering more and more territory, even if only temporarily? The whole scene is just so pussywhipped:

I’ve also suffered a lot of social ostricization in this crowd simply because my exes tend to win the popularity contest with sexual coercion. I’ve come to accept the fact that a lot of people end up banging my exes. I just wish they wouldn’t be mean to me simply because they are insecure about it. Apparently, this is too much to ask.

I went to a burner party in Austin called Art Outside. I actually volunteered in their kitchen, cooking food for all the attendees, thinking maybe that if I approached the community as a humble servant, they might accept me. But instead I was kind of ostracized by the elite of the scene, one of whom was my supervisor. I sent her a friend request on FaceBook, strictly platonicly, as she is married, or at least as married as burners get, and I respect marriage. I really just thought maybe she could be a contact to me in that world. But I guess I wasn’t cool enough to accepted into her elite little circle. So a few weeks later I sent a her a message like “What the Fuck?” And she responed: “I have over 75 unchecked friend requests and I get 5 a day, so don’t give me this attitude.” My, what a perfect example of the female social privilege and how it renders women unappreciative of their social opportunities, and other people in general. 75 friend requests is 75 more opportunities to make friends than I have.

These are the people to whom “Don’t feed the trolls” has come to mean “ignore anyone whose opinion differs from your own”. These are the people who support eachother in error, instead of being good enough friends to confront eachother when they are screwing up. In the name of promoting self-reliance, they let people starve to death in the gutter while themselves indifferently celebrating their own prosperity. And they tend to keep themselves sealed in the bubble of this rose colored view of the world, denouncing as “haters” anyone who tries to burst that bubble with a needle of reality. They don’t seem to understand that their decadence comes at the expense of the less fortunate and their privilege is built on the backs of the lower class they have excluded from their merriment. Nor would they even care, as these are people who are only hippies for the sake of aesthetics and fashion, and not politically or spiritually.

It’s easy to tell the real hippies from the fake ones: the real hippies are down-to-earth, dumpster divers, freecyclers, people who live in communes and grow their own food. People who bike instead of driving to avoid dependence on fossil fuels and resource wars. Another big difference between neo-hippies and classic hippies is the drugs they do! Notice that the original hippie movement was inspired in large part by LSD, a mind-blowing psychedelic, and the raver, EDM, Burner or neo-hippie movement was inspired mainly by MDMA, which is a far more sensual, superficial high. Therein lies the conflict between drugs that destroy the ego and drugs that feed the ego. Whereas a psychedelic might cause people to question the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, MDMA is a purely hedonistic, sensual experience. And that’s why the movement spawned by MDMA hasn’t gotten far from the over-privileged, rich suburban kid nightclub culture where it started. Anyway, I would never sell drugs to a Burner, because most of them are rats. They talk all this anti-establishment talk, but most of them are hopelessly dependent upon either the government or the wealthy elite for survival in the modern world, and when you put them in the little white room downtown with some pigs oinking in their face, they’ll sing like canaries!

And what many of these misguided youth don’t realize is that their “rebellion” in the form of promiscuity and drug abuse isn’t anywhere near as revolutionary as they think, in fact it is quite counter-revolutionary, because the rich and the powerful are doing the same sexual and chemical decadence as the neo-hippies, they are simply doing it in nicer hotels. Someone who refuses to participate in the Babylonian orgy of mindless self-indulgence would be a true revolutionary, but these are few and far between.

I disagree. I think society collectively creates reality, and often a reality that is oppressive or exploitative to certain individual(s). Assholes decide for others, and they pick up a lot of bad karma in doing so. When they next live, it will be they who are the slaves. This is why preservation, appreciation, enlightenment, and liberation are so much better paths to take than oppression, destructive consumption, deception, and exploitation, because the benevolent path always leads to a better place. You can’t say “you create your own reality” but then blame someone else for an equal and opposite reaction. That would be a form of “lemon tree” spirituality: privatizing the gains and publicizing the losses. The government and economy may run in such a stupid way, but the laws of God are more intelligent. If you truly create your own reality, then only YOU can break the cycle… Which often entails a repayment in good faith before one can move on from whatever hole they have dug for themselves. The universe is not unjust, people are unjust. They place upon eachother undeserved burdens, and working together can hold down very powerful beings, but everything you do is ultimately at your own expense, even if it may seem otherwise in the moment. Solipsism, insensitivity, conceit, and lack of social conscience are not the path to enlightenment.

Some say, “attain wholeness and everything will flock to you”. But the truth is that these philosophies are merely rationalizations for our privilege at the expense of others. We live in a community, we are not individual brains in vats, experiencinga virtual reality. We must learn to coexist and not simply retreat into our selves, or dominate and exploit others. Both are self-serving philosophies that do not ultimately serve the self or others, but simply condemn ourselves at the expense of everyone. Resource income is finite, but as Gandhi pointed out, “There is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.”

As someone who acknowledges the impact of other minds on my reality, and mine on theirs, I feel as though my solipsism has been broken by my empathy and sensitivity. But without those things, solipsism will persist in someone’s mind, making them sinkholes that exploit the world through willful ignorance of and negligence towards others, and lack of appreciation.

All truth is relative to a certain degree, because we all have our own unique perceptions of the world that we carry with us, and wouldn’t it be boring if we were all the same? However, there is also a certain amount of objective truth. No amount of wishing or hoping would make an airplane fly if it were designed upon the principle that 2+2=5. Would you ride in such a plane? I wouldn’t.

If there is one thing that the clubbers of Austin have shown me, it’s that hedonism is made much more immoral by a cliquey, exclusionist, elitist attitude. Blessed are those who share their pleasures with others in the name of social justice. The scenes where this happens are scenes that I tend to gravitate towards, especially the punk scene, which I feel is a world obsessed with social justice. The music of the EDM scene can be appealing, but I find the common attitudes there can be a bit repugnant in their conceit, blissful obliviousness to the problems of others, and lack of social conscience. I hope Burners like it when things are on fire. I hope they like the desert. And I especially hope they like it hot. Because their whole scene reeks of bad karma.

This is now my standard response to victim-blamers, and the socially negligent:

Whenever I hear a lassiez-faire hippy girl try to project her own victim complex onto me, I have a strong urge to take her to Darfur, and see if she has the pomposity to tell a little girl systemically raped by a warlord government that there are no real victims, and it’s all in her head.

The problem is that there are two concepts at play here, and as someone who has a degree in Psychology, I understand both. Unfortunately, this concept of Blaming the Victim became a subject of mass awareness, and thus a cliche.So people started playing the victim card even when it wasn’t really applicable. This became called a “victim complex“. (It’s all everyone else’s fault, denial of personal responsibility, etc…)This had the unfortunate effect of discrediting the actual victims.

So what we frequently see these days is people with victim complexes psychologically projecting that complex onto an ACTUAL victim. Which is not at all appropriate, because it is an egregious injustice, and the worst form of victim blaming there is. The whole philosophy is basically “stop hitting yourself”, but being perpetrated by those who claim to be adults.

This is the kind of phenomena we see when pop psychology causes people to think they understand sophisticated concepts when in fact those concepts have been grossly oversimplified. Perhaps you should get a degree in Psych/Neuro like me, then you would be more able to tell the difference between a Victim Complex and an Actual Victim.

Even victims can be happy. They can learn to live with whatever they have been deprived of by a cruel world. But that doesn’t make it fair, that doesn’t mean they aren’t owed reparations.On the other hand, someone with an unhealthy habit who suffers the DIRECT consequences of that habit (let’s just say, gambling, because most of the consequences of drug use are legal, which is an artificial consequence that adds injury to injury). But let’s just say gambling, since it has the inherent consequence of losing money. And then the gambler can’t pay his rent. If he then says, “This is all the fault of that roulette wheel/racehorse/football team”, or maybe even, “My Dad didn’t raise me right,” or “Everyone is out to get me,” Those are all victim complexes. Often time the only way to avoid enabling someone who exhibits such behavior is to let them suffer the consequences of their own bad behavior, until they are driven by consequence to change that behavior.But someone who has suffered systemic injustice (drug war, police brutality, rape, robbery, etc): Those are actual victims, who deserve empathy, social support, and if possible, reparations paid by the people who victimized them. Often though, what I have found is that those with guilty consciences will simply give to charity instead of their victims, thus assuaging their own guilt, but leaving their victims in the cold.

The biggest problem I’ve ever seen, personally, is when a person’s situation is deteriorating so badly that no one wants to get involved. Thus, more and more rationalization is applied to avoid helping or even continuing to victimize someone who is down on their luck.You see this all the time in societies with Laissez-Faire attitudes. “Oh, he’s just a loser, that’s his problem. It certainly has nothing to do with the fact that we beat him up and steal his lunch money every day.” Some people are victimized early on in life and then get typecast as the victim, and are put in a victim class of people who are considered “fair game”. This happens with cultural prejudice and institutionalized bigotry (the Drug War, Predatory Lending). In these cases, it *really is* ‘society’s fault’.But yes, there are some people who play the victim card when it is not appropriate, and in doing so, they discredit actual victims. So neither the Victim Complex or Blaming the Victim is good, but the point is to be able to tell one from the other.

I hate to bag on the whole burner crowd, but I have found a lot of the club kids and burner girls to not be the greatest people in the world. I like some of their art and music, but I would rather hang out in scenes that pride themselves in social conscience. That’s why I involve myself with the punk crowd, certain local business concerns, and anarcho-socialist political activism. I would love to involve myself more in the academic community if I had the time, energy, and money, but whatever…

I think about all the people that shunned me in the EDM scene and it’s like,you know, all I wanted from them was legit friendship. Get to know me and point me in the direction you think is right… But they couldn’t even do that without running games. It’s whatever, though, really. I laugh about it now. Totally their loss. Over petty differences, these people have kicked me out of their so-called “community”. This one guy even had the audacity to suggest that Miley Cyrus is punk, and when I politely explained to him how he was wrong and what he said was offensive to punks, he de-friended me! And it’s like, really, dude? You’re gonna make things awkward between us every time we see eachother out over something so petty? And then there are the same old ego games with other swinging dicks trying to get the same girls as me…

Anyway, I feel like more mature crowds are where I will find those that can empathize with me, and yet haven’t been around too much, sexually. In other words, other intellectuals, not shallow hedonists. You don’t have to sacrifice cool for intelligence or vice versa. There are acceptable middle grounds out there, you just have to get out of the mainstream and into the little niches to find them. And the EDM/Burner crowd has become mainstream. Corporate. Government-approved.

Which is reflected in the fact that many in the burner community are Democrats or Libertarians, people who believe in both the false authority of popularity and the false authority of money. And both types of people persecute minorities. The persecution of minority by democracy, and the tyranny of majority will, is the trial of the unique by those who conform, rationalized via popularity contest dominated by the ignorant and stupid. A Republic differs from a Democracy in that it is majority rule, but with rights reserved for statistical minorities. I think it is a shame that neither Republican nor Democrat in modern America understands this, which is a big part of the reason why I am neither Democrat nor Republican. Conservative Libertarianism is the belief that oneself should be free, materially and sensually, even at the expense of the environment and the under-privileged. Liberal Anarchism is the belief that the world ought to be free, even at the expense of oneself, not only for ideological reasons, but for the sake of one’s own karma. But politics are very misunderstood by the Burner Community, who often label anyone who attempts to discuss political matters as “too political” and tells them “go back to Occupy”.

The message I have gotten from the government is that wild partying is fine (as long as you let the crooked local authorities wet their beaks), but don’t try to temper it or balance it out with meaningful spirituality and basic morality, or else it’s some kind of offensive sacrilege that no one respects. In other words “don’t get your religion in my drug orgy”, because this is a lawyer society where what’s legal are lawyer vices: lying, adultery, stealing, and alcohol. And the church is thought of as a place totally separate from that, where we go to beg forgiveness. It’s a recipe for repression and denial. Just as liberal fascism is a recipe for censorship and revisionism.

Also, there is a disdain for science in this community, even though they are dependent upon technology, and a tendency to use false, new-age spiritual values to rationalize one’s own hedonistic shortcomings. And that is a big part of the reason for the split between Occupy and Burning Man. Burners are people who idolize politicians that think for them instead of thinking for themselves, and supporting those who challenge the unjust rule of law and respecting people who make sacrifices in fighting the system that oppresses us all.

I think it is the role of a church in society to tell people how to live with eachother in a way that is civil. I think it is sad we have a society where there are no values, just empty, meaningless entertainment. I don’t think it’s sinful to enjoy life, but I feel like, without some moral direction, people revert back to these animalistic roles and the result is an unhealthy community of ego games, insecurity, repression and denial. And yet the closest thing we have to churches are these spiritually dead, bigoted, dogmatic brainwashing centers where people are too cloistered and judgmental to be relevant to the mainstream. Churches need to be allowed to get hip, and cool people need to add depth, dimension, and social conscience to themselves. Only a church that makes concessions to moral hardlining with regards to sex and drugs could accomplish this. The system is powerless to help us, so we have to create social institutions that can help. This is one of the reasons I have been fighting drug laws on the grounds that they are unconstitutional, in that they oppress my Freedom of Religion. But I have received zero support from the Burner “community” in this arduous endeavor, in fact most are so hateful of me for petty reasons, they probably hope I’ll end up in prison.

But don’t ever tell a burner they need to get their skank asses to church, though. They are notoriously superficial and would probably not tolerate the lecture, because they don’t want to hear anything they disagree with that might offend their sensibilities. And there are plenty of douchebags in this community as well, guys who see it as their “fuck-it list”. The thing is that social patriarchy is the idea that men should make social and sexual decisions for women. And even though feminists resist this, their chauvinism causes most of them to end up with patriarchs who pursue them, while leaving unselfish, non-interfering men to die alone in a cage of involuntary celibacy and social isolation.

But that’s my point to hedonistic neo-hippies: Deepen yourself. Add some dimension to your character. Read a book. Learn something. Hang out in a place where the music isn’t blaringly loud, preventing meaningful conversation and retarding the ability to actually get to know someone. Don’t just dance around like an idiot to meaningless music with a head full of goofenthal. Otherwise, you might as well be a Sparkle Pony.

When I tell people that I am both a Christian and a scientist (but not a Christian Scientist, LoL), I often get puzzled stares in reply. How does one reconcile those two? Aren’t faith and reason mutually exclusive to eachother?

Well, no, not really. There are several philosophies that embrace both faith and reason, two of which are very dear to me: Gnosticism and Deism. Also, when it comes to creation stories, I favor Intelligent Design over strict creationism, simply because certain versions of Intelligent Design acknowledge the validity of Evolutionary theory, both stellar and biological. Finally, I also believe in reincarnation, an Eastern mystical idea I think was woefully omitted from mainstream Christianity, in which I have very little faith, due to the fact that the canonical Bible is moreso the revisionist product of oppressive ancient political regimes than any inherently valid history, philosophy, or morality.

While meeting with a Deist discussion group, the question was posed: “Since Deists are often considered atheists by traditional religions, have you as a Deist ever been forced to endure any abuse from traditional theists?” After a few minutes thought, my response to this was: “Actually, as a Deist, I have taken far more abuse from self-righteous, know-it-all Atheists than any variety of Theist.”

What most atheists refuse to recognize is that Atheism is in itself a leap of faith. One cannot prove that there is no God any more than one can prove, conclusively, that there is a God. It is logically impossible to prove a negative. Think of it this way: If I were to tell you that the apples from my tree were the best-tasting apples in the world, how would you go about invalidating this claim? You would have to taste apples from every single tree in the world, compare them to mine and find one superior, a task which would probably be impossible within a single human lifespan, to say nothing of devising a system for rating the taste of apples objectively.

And the same thing applies to proving or disproving the existence of God. The universe is vast. Humans have been studying it for hundreds of thousands of years, and still haven’t completely figured it out. We thought we had a pretty good handle on it when Newton enumerated his laws of physics, but then Einstein figured out that those only work on Earth, and there are objects in deep space like pulsars, quasars, and black holes that violate Newtonian physics, which is why the Special Theory of Relativity and General theory of Relativity had to be created. Einstein was never able to create a unified field theory to unite the micro with the macro that fit with observable data. But suffice to say, science is a work in progress that is taking thousands of years, and may never be complete.

And many Atheists will attack the straw man of this idea of a benevolent God. If God exists, why is there so much suffering in the world? Well, just because God isn’t what you want it to be, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Maybe God transcends or is beyond human morality. Maybe God doesn’t give a damn about Planet Earth or the human race. Maybe God is a psychopath. But in any case, saying that there is no God just because it doesn’t work for you personally above all others is akin to a spoiled brat saying he has no parents just because they won’t buy him a Ferrari.

Thus, the only really logically defensible position is agnosticism, which is a simple admission that one doesn’t know whether God exists or not. But I like to think of my ontological viewpoint as consisting of both knowledge AND belief. There are things that I know and can prove through repeatable demonstration, and there are things I merely believe through circumstantial evidence and intuition. And finally, there are my hopes, dreams, and wishes to which I cling.

There is also Chaos Theory and the Anthropic Principle to consider, in addition to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Perhaps the universe merely appears ordered because we are viewing it through a human lens, or perhaps this pocket of order in which we find ourselves is not truly reflective of the ultimately chaotic universe in which we live. There are many Black Swans that could potentially pop up to challenge our currently accepted ontological models. Think of it this way: In a truly random sequence of numbers, the subsequence “12345” is bound to occur by random chance. But this doesn’t mean that the entire sequence is ordered, even if we could only perceive the part that is. Chaos, by definition, can contain random pockets of finite order, but order cannot contain any chaos whatsoever. Thus, chaos is ideologically superior to order.

Many atheists will cling to Occam’s Razor in order to rationalize oversimplifying complex ontological problems. But aren’t things actually getting more and more complicated the more knowledge of the microcosm and macrocosm we uncover? How often do you crack open a sophisticated, newly-engineered piece of technology and find a simple mechanism driving it? So maybe the simplest explanation isn’t always correct. Maybe that’s just a way that people with access to privileged information try to convince those denied the facts to stop asking questions.

What I have found is that many atheists, via their amoral and insensitive behavior, often become so invested in there not being a God, Karma, or Cosmic Justice, that they refuse to acknowledge any evidence to the contrary, in what becomes a kind of reverse Pascal’s Wager. On the other hand, some Christians treat the crucifixion as a blank check to do whatever they want, as if Jesus Christ died 2000 years ago so that they can be assholes today. The point I guess is that both Atheists and religious fundamentalists rely upon dogma, often because it enables their selfish behavior.

Atheists also like to point at atrocities committed by organized religion as a way to discredit it. This inevitably includes mention of The Salem Witch Trials, The Crusades, and the Inquisition. But these attacks only apply to organized religion, not necessarily personal faith. Besides, atheists have the egregious human rights violations of Stalin’s, Mao’s, and Pol Pot’s authoritarian communist atheism to answer for, as well as the tyranny of post-agricultural society, and scientific abominations like nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare.

But this paper isn’t meant to be a criticism of Atheism, or religious fundamentalism, both of which which I feel dig their own hole and thus need no further chastization, but rather, it is a defense of faith from those who would say that all faith is unreasonable. It is my position that one can be both faithful and reasonable at the same time, as long as one has the proper framework of knowledge and belief. So bear with me, because this is going to take some biographical storytelling to explain, as many of my ideas do.

I’m not much into ministry, because I think that convincing others of your beliefs is just another way of rationalizing them. Instead, I try to celebrate diversity and acknowledge that everyone is one their own unique spiritual path. I don’t pretend to be on the ultimate path, and I think that all paths eventually lead to the same positive place even if some take more detours than others. But I do urge others to be prosocial in their morality, no matter what faith or lack thereof they may choose.

I haven’t always believed in things like God, the soul, karma, reincarnation, the afterlife, or cosmic justice. In fact, hardship and injustice were what caused the dark, faithless times in my life. And yet still, I rejected Nihilism, the Will to Power, and other philosophies that would enable my depravity and tyranny. Instead, I searched for meaning, and slowly, the pieces of the puzzle came together. Most of those pieces were books, and a few of them were people.

The first book to ever fill my heart with spiritual inspiration and joy was the Tao Teh Ching by Lao Tzu. This book was not given to me purposefully. My father, the Machiavellian executive, in a classic Lex and Lionel Luthor moment, gave me the Art of War by Sun Tzu at the age of 13, thinking that it would help me succeed in the world. But I found the book to be quite boring, and, returning it to its boxed set, there I found Lao Tzu’s tome. I was enthralled by it, and have been reading and recommending it ever since. In fact, I have purchased and given away more copies of this book as a form of ministry than any other book written by a human being, as it is one of my favorites.

But the Tao never fully satisfied my visceral desires. It was a book about how to be a monk, and win by losing. The book seemed to only satisfy my right brain, leaving my left, more analytical mind wanting. And in a materialistic society such as America, I found my Eastern values constantly being disrespected, and myself constantly offended by such a two-dimensional system.

That was when I started studying Kabbalah, numerology, gematria, astrology, and Jewish mysticism, and specifically the work of Aleister Crowley. The thing I loved most about Crowley’s philosophy was the emphasis on the existence of the Soul, aka the Higher Self, whose higher conscious will was supposed to be exhalted over the baser urges of the body such as hunger, chemical dependence, emotions, material greed, and the sex drive. Here we see one of my first exposures to Cartesian dualism: the idea that there is a material will and a spiritual will, and that one should be held in higher regard than the other. Also the idea that the material world simply isn’t real, or is the projection of a false God.

It was through my study of the Tree of Life that I became exposed to the work of a man named Drunvalo Melchizedek, and the concept of Sacred Geometry. Drunvalo is a very great man, and I credit him with bringing me into the light, by giving my left brain the proof it needed that God exists. His work was all about the patterns and structures in nature: The Phi Ratio, the Golden Mean Rectangle, Metatron’s Cube, and the Flower of life. These things all related to the patterns in nature, molecular structure, cellular structure, plant growth, even galaxy formation that seemed to suggest that there was an underlying order to the universe, and that this order did not render itself by random chance. The watchmaker’s argument began to ring truer as new information came to light.

But it wasn’t just the science Drunvalo presented that contributed to my personal philosophy: it was the history as well. For Drunvalo told a story about the Fall of Man, which I considered crucial to my own theology. It was he who introduced me to the concepts of Luciferian Dualism and Unity Consciousness. Because Earth has fallen from God and Unity Consciousness, it has become a Luciferian planet, where all living beings are in competition with eachother, rather than synergizing through cooperation. The idea that “I” am separate from everything and everyone else, rather than “I” simply being a unique facet of the same jewel that embodies all of creation, is the Devil’s delusion, forced upon us all by the illusion of materialism, finity, and mortality.

At the same time that I was maintaining a private study of spirituality and theology, strictly to satisfy my own thirst for knowledge regarding the subject, I was also enrolled in a very research-oriented scholastic institution, dissecting brains and learning experimental design and statistical analysis. Taking apart a brain and mapping its neural network, and knowing that the entirety of a human being’s thoughts, opinions, and beliefs were contained within, could easily drive one to some very depressingly deterministic conclusions.

But instead, I simply recognized that the brain was merely a tool of the soul. It is a material thing just like any other, the avatar of our soul in the material world, but I refused to believe that a person’s brain and body are the entirety of their being. Instead, I see them as vessels. Very complicated and beautifully articulated vessels (especially when we are referring to beautiful women, whom I relate to the engineered perfection of European sportscars), but mere vessels nonetheless. The true essence of one’s being was the soul, and what is a soul but a facet of the Divine? So, even though I respected the scientific method as it applied to materialist systems such as physics, chemistry, and biology, I thought of these systems as secondary in importance to the spiritual realm, which I consider the driving force behind consciousness, and life itself.

Basically, I believe in a force superior to the brain, and layers of existence on top of the mere physical. A whole system of mental, emotional, and spiritual planes. And maybe even a bad plane beneath the material, that some people get sucked into when they die, like: “Aggghhhh, oh no! I shouldn’t have been such a douchebag!” The universe needs a toilet, I think. I like to believe that some sinners can be redeemed through some sort of spiritual salvation, but let’s face it: some people are just going to Hell. I used to think Hell was a dumb idea until I became awake to the way some people treat eachother. Now I’m all for it. Maybe not forever, but I do think some souls could benefit from punishment.

I also began learning how to think rationally through internet discussion. Merely proffering an idea did not make it valid; that idea had to stand up to the relentless analysis of some very ruthless minds on the internet, and I had some of my ideological children horribly maimed by the logic of others in this way, until I learned to think more objectively and not be too attached to my ideas. The internet, I think, can be a crucible for ideas, which is good, because it won’t allow bullshit to fly for too long, at least not completely uncontested by contrarian thinkers.

It was at this point in my studies that events in my personal life brought me to become a Christian. Romantic failure, legal persecution, and financial misappropriation had made my life a living Hell, and this caused me to, for the first time ever, empathize with Jesus Christ as he was crucified. And I realized that those who suffer for the benefit of others carry a certain divinity to their grave. As much as I wanted to take revenge upon those who had slighted me in one way or another, I realized both the futility in doing so, and the far greater reward of living and letting die.

But my personal Christian theology was a very Gnostic one, both because I rejected the canonical gospel, and because I valued the use of entheogenic substances in my spiritual journey. Marijuana, psilocybin, LSD, MDMA… these were all cognitive tools that I used to explore myself, the material world, and the Astral Plane. In other words, I knew God through experience.

Also, if Satan and God were at war, and the Fall of Man was a consequence of that war, then Jesus was the reconciliation of God and Satan, the Alpha and the Omega. The Spiritual and Material. The left and the right. The light and the darkness. Through the salvation of Christ, God’s son, man was allowed to ascend from Hell and be healed by the light.

I also have great respect for the Hindu system of reincarnation, which I believe is something that most enlightened beings subscribe to as well. Through past life regression and conversation with my Higher Self, I began to uncover the agenda of my soul, which has always been that of liberator. In every life I have lived on Earth, I have fought for freedom. I have died on many battlefields and come back stronger every time. Some of my battles were political, some social, some economic, some material, and some spiritual. But it was always my faith that made it so easy to sacrifice myself to a cause, the knowledge that nothing material would ever truly hurt me more than selling out my values and acquiring bad karma would. In other words: to compromise one’s values is seen as carrying far greater spiritual consequences than the mere material consequences of taking a stand: imprisonment, injury, death, etc…

Conversely, there are those who have lived many lives dedicated to oppression. I believe these types of people are those who are so stuck in the moment that they are blind to the bigger picture. Maybe they buy too much into the illusion of the material. So, I believe that human history is the story of souls reincarnating themselves over and over on this planet to fight the same battles in a neverending progression towards paradise and enlightenment, with some people being more effective to this end than others.

But of course, there are far better places to be incarnate, and far more powerful forms than human to take. And I believe that this is where the idea of the “afterlife” comes in. For once you are done with Earth, there are many other levels to move to, just like a worm becomes a butterfly and takes to the skies in a new life.

Just as you were once a lower form of life, you are destined to become a higher form of life. And the material world is like a school, or maybe even a work-release prison. Karma is your grade, and how well you do is what determines whether or not you graduate, or are released. The idea that the material, external world is more real than the internal world of the spirit, to me, is laughable. We are all playing Satan’s game, Satan, AKA Samael, God’s wisest Angel, the Tester of Souls. The weigher of hearts against a feather.

And out of respect for Satan, and the very idea of paying the Devil his due, I respect physics, science, chemistry, biology, and all the other deterministic systems in which I find myself temporary entangled, mostly due to the intricacy of their design and the fun that can be had playing this game. Satan made the physical universe, and is the master of everything material. But God’s invention is far superior: the Spirit. My faith in God is what makes me see the value in basic morality, so that my Spirit will not karmically be weighed down to this physical plane forever. Because there are higher levels of consciousness to be achieved, and we will all get there eventually.

Though every person is a universe unto themselves, being incarnate in the physical realm breaks our solipsism by exposing us to the problem of other minds, which is why we have to be on our best behavior in our interactions with others, in order to avoid bad karma and keep a clean conscience. How interpersonal conflicts of agenda are resolved is what defines a society. This is where politics come into play, as well as economics, and we must carefully scrutinize our social infrastructure in order to route out systemic injustice and promote harmonic human interaction. Unifying the world both in spite of and in celebration of cultural differences is obviously key to this goal.

But ultimately, because I believe that God is an anarchist, a facilitator and not a ruler, I believe that the point of life and consciousness is to eventually become Gods in our own right, and foster the evolution of beings less spiritually evolved than ourselves. We are all moving towards a higher level of consciousness, and that will entail more autonomy and ability to create our own life, and our own theatres upon which it will perform.

Spirituality and great works are the path to true freedom, whereas atheistic, nihilistic, scientific determinism is a prison of ignorance in which we confine ourselves. To believe otherwise is to believe that humans are merely biological machines, with no meaning or purpose in life but to work, consume, and reproduce. When in reality, there are contributions to make: art, music, literature, and applied science. Cures to disease and the solutions to environmental problems. New technology to make life safer and more enjoyable.

I hope my faith and reason coexisting prove that it is possible to retain old school spiritual values while still being progressive politically and a futurist and transhumanist technologically and scientifically.

What is a psychopath? A psychopath is someone who is born with no capability or a reduced capability to empathize with others. He or she does not share a common conscience with his or her fellow man. A sociopath, on the other hand, is someone who learns insensitivity to others via negative life experience. In the new DSM-V, both of these terms have been reduced to the term “Anti-Social Personality Disorder”, which I believe is a misnomer, since those who have this condition can often be VERY social, in a manipulative, self-serving way. Also, the idea that ASPD’s have no emotions is not true, in my experience with them. ASPD’s have plenty of emotion, but they are hyper-sensitive to their own emotions, and insensitive to the emotions of others.

As someone with an interest in economics, government, sexual politics, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology, I have wasted entirely too much time dissecting human behavior, as well as thinking in the macro about society in general. Perhaps these efforts are an attempt to understand humanity as much as they are to understand my own personal life, and the behavior of individuals within it. Both the dissecting analytical and creative visionary natures of my mind will not allow me to ignore how the individual’s actions affect society in general, nor will it allow me to avoid inferring general sociological conclusions from specific human situations.

I am not a hypersexual person, nor am I a greedy materialist. I find meaning in my studies, my art, and my work, rather than gross materialism or sensualism. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to be loved, provided for materially, and accepted socially. But in providing for myself and seeking social acceptance, I do try to keep an eye on the impact my behavior is having on my environment, from trying to reduce my carbon footprint, to trying to be righteous in my social actions, and having an ultimately positive impact on my community. I try to be just as sensitive to the needs of the planet and others as I am to my own needs. I do not seek to exploit others or be exploited by them.

But it seems as though people like myself are a dying breed. Manipulative, aggressive, exploitative psychopaths and insensitive, self-centered, conceited solipsists are taking over the world. For one thing, the dominant society on earth, Western society, is completely based on rewarding selfish behavior. We have built a society that rewards and propagates, more than anything, selfish, manipulative Machiavellianism. Who are the captains of industry, government, and society in America? The quiet, nerdy scientists who make everything work? The artists who look deep inside their souls to create something culturally relevant? No, these people are slaves who are exploited by an owner class of sleazy, manipulative executives who are merely glorified salesmen, incompetent managers, and crooked authorities, propped up by scientific powers they don’t fully understand.

Before the advent of civilization, the cerebral yet physically weak were beaten down by the impulsive and physically strong. But now that man is ‘civilized’, these impulsive reptiles have stopped killing the beta nerds, recognizing their value, and instead dominate them socially, economically, and governmentally, not destroying them, but exploiting their talents and enslaving them in subservient roles. These traditionally dominant bloodlines have devised a whole system of force, economy, and government in order to do this. Alpha insecurity about beta intellectual and moral superiority causes them to saddle betas with artificial handicaps, such as debts and criminal records, enforced by the fascist system. Basically, the personification of Western society is a bully that robs a nerd for his lunch money. And who is the woman in all this? She is a willing accomplice to the dominant alpha male, even if regret of her collusion causes her to make false rape allegations post hoc.

Americans have created a society where being a good person and being good at getting what one wants are diametrically antagonistic agendas. In this modern world, truly no good deed goes unpunished. Morality is often in conflict with both the law and business as usual. This is generally bad in that it creates a world where only the morally worst people rise to the top, whereas the morally decent people are ostracized and stripped of social, economic, and political power. This trend can be exemplified in business, politics, and even human sexuality, which itself is a huge factor in the evolution of the human race.

If men create patriarchy through acts of government oppression and economic exploitation, then women create matriarchy through sexual liberty and the social power structures it inevitably entails.

Unrestrained sexual liberty combined with existing social conventions, constructs, and institutions will destroy the human race if we let it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy sex just as much as the next person, but I believe sexual behavior should be tempered by social conscience and responsibility, as very intense emotions are involved. So the potential for subterfuge, manipulation, and building oppressive social power structures through sex exists in the same way it exists for drugs, oil, or anything else humans want. Desire is the root of all suffering and it is through desire that people are subverted.

Unfortunately, there is no place in traditional romance for a man who is uncertain, who questions himself and everyone else, who is a skeptic. Instead, romance is dominated by over-confident, under-thinking macho douchebags, and women make it that way by allowing such people to twist their arms and talk them into contrived, often-times abusive relationships. A man has to be a manipulative psychopath to be loved by women these days, because of the female privilege and sense of entitlement. And which males are best equipped to give a woman what she wants? Those who have obeyed and gone along with the tyranny, thus winning resources through conquest.

As a conscientious objector to fascist whoredom masquerading as romance and sexual liberty, I look down upon the relations between the sexes and I say this:

Women are too conceited, spoiled, and self-centered, and it costs them their best opportunities. They have made it to where men have to jump through hoops and climb mountains to obtain their love, not realizing that the cost of admission they have set filters out the decent and the honest, and favors the aggressive and manipulative. If women weren’t so self-focused, they would fall in love with men before they were bribed by them, and pursue the men they found attractive, instead of gamely waiting for some opportunist posing as a knight in shining armor to come up with an approach to win them over, thus fulfilling unrealistic romantic fantasies.

Men, on the other hand, are too sexually driven. They so badly want to take it to the hole that they discard honesty and suppress their feelings. They end up in relationships with incompatible people just because they want to get laid. There is no brotherhood among men, and men steal and poison eachother’s romantic opportunities ruthlessly and mercilessly, often employing underhanded tactics in doing so. Basically, in order to meet in the middle, men need to be more passive, and women more aggressive. Romantic competition, traditionlly a contest of piousness, has become a race to the bottom, where the best man no longer wins, but the most ruthless. Sexual strategies of males have proven that “science is the rape of the natural world”, as Ian Malcolm would say, by creating a kind of artificial, “manufactured consent” as Noam Chomsky would say.

How is it possible that, statistically, women have more sex than men, and with more partners? The answer is simple: most single men don’t have sex very often (in fact, studies show that 20% of men have 80% of the sex), but a certain type of single man has a lot of sex with a lot of partners: the manipulative psychopath. The reason that more psychopaths are born every day is that existing social conventions and constructs regarding romance favor the psychopath. A man who can quickly, detachedly move from one target to the next will do much better than a man who is sentimental and has to contend with his own feelings and the inevitable sting of rejection. Thus, the emotionally insensitive outbreed people with feelings.

So the story of the American family is quite simple: Alpha male conquers world by dominating beta males, then with his stolen resources, he wins the solipsist female, and together they have babies that are even more selfish than themselves. This is how selfish genetics propagate themselves, with a little help from social constructs that encourage selfish behavior.

Women keep fucking psychopaths and having their babies, simply because they find emotional stoicism sexually attractive or due to simple material concerns, and, not wanting to put themselves through the headache of actually getting to know someone through proper romance, women seek out, through participation and selection bias in their romantic standards, men with these dominant attitudes specifically, for sexual play. Passive beta males, on the other hand, are left in a social prison of involuntary celibacy, unless they are able to make themselves so useful to the alphas that they might throw him their leftovers.

Often times, females will impregnate themselves via alphas, then settle down with a wealthy, stable, or loving beta and get him to raise the kid that isn’t even his! This is a perfect example of how women want one guy for his genetic material and another guy for his resources, which is why alphas often attempt to have wealth in addition to desirable genetics. I believe these attitudes are artifacts of pre-historic rape culture, whereby even modern men and women are acting out primitive gender roles, possibly due to inherent instinct. Whereas in pre-historic civilization, women were objectified by men, in modern society, women objectify themselves. But women are not objects. Objects are not subject to moral scrutiny.

In the past, women who tolerated or even enjoyed rape were far more likely to pass their genetics to the next generation than women who resisted, because those who resisted were simply killed, obliterated by men’s physical dominance. This is why many women still enjoy being dominated today. Aggressive women and submissive males are considered statistically anomalous mutations, even in modern society, and there are various psychological theories to address them, the most disturbing of which is modern gender relational theory, which often attempts to label as transgender or homosexual anyone who resists being confined to the gender roles defined, not by intrinsic human nature, but by obsolete social construct.

The Limbic system is the Reptillian brain. It enumerates the baser urges in the form of behaviors. In some humans, this structure plays a more dominant role in driving human behavior than others. The evolved human has a cerebrum, or a neo-cortex, through which all decisions pass. Those with more inhibitory neurons in their frontal lobes are more likely to scrutinize things, including their own or others’ behavior. This is what we call “thinking cerebrally” as opposed to merely acting impulsively, through instinct.

Evolutionary psychology tells us that selfish, manipulative people will have more sex with more partners than selfless, non-interfering people. The effect this ultimately has on the human population is to create more selfish, manipulative offspring. And thus society collapses and human civilization declines. Sexual liberty has unleashed a hoarde of demons upon this planet.

Female solipsism and hypergamy, combined with a governmental and economic system that promotes the worst of the worst has made romance a shallow, classist, materialist contrivance. When sex is awarded through bribery that is paid for via violent or unethical conquest, the victorious and dominant males in this system are merely participants in a more refined version of rape culture, and the female winners are mere fascist whores. Men often jock their “game”… but what does this word imply? That females are mere animals to be hunted. Any relationships started in this way are doomed to failure and encourage infidelity. When we act impulsively, without planning, we are not likely to be satisfied by what we get for very long. Women on the other hand have developed this ideology that monogamy and commitment are about ownership rather than simple respect for their partner’s feelings.

Perhaps romance should be approached from a more top-down perspective, a kind of meeting of the minds to determine compatibility before sex ever happens. But the nature of social power conflicts with such a civilized approach to dating. Social power is often in conflict with moral values. People are loyal to the people who make them feel good or support them materially, rather than being loyal to ideologies, such as peace, love, unity, and respect. Thus, in an overly- sensual, materialist society, social power is a function of immorality rather than merit.

Even those liberal enclaves who say they are dedicated to love are not often actually dedicated to the ideal of love… they are dedicated to eachother, the people to whom they have grown close over time… but for strangers, they reserve their hate. This is the easiest way to spot an enclave of groupthinkers… They support eachother in error, but will not support a stranger in being correct.

Personally, I’d rather be hyper-critical than hypo-critical. What’s funny is that the word “hypocrite” literally means “under critical”, as in they didn’t employ enough critical thinking, or they didn’t criticize enough, thus they became a hypocrite.This is why certain scenes that are based on “supporting eachother”, AKA “dick riding” become full of people who are hypocrites: because they haven’t criticized themselves or eachother, they have philosophies that are logically inconsistent. It’s kind of an “emperor wears no clothes” situation. I see a lot of that going on in the hippie/burner world, and pointing it out will only get you ostracized.

Even peaceful hippies are dependent upon war and empire for their sustenance, a fact which many liberals are in denial of. America’s wars are all resource wars, and the only way to stop them is to curb demand, and yet sensualists and materialists carry on their decadence in escape of this most basic of grim truths and harsh realities. And this begs the question: Is your touchy-feely positivity really all that positive if it comes at the expense of the under-privileged, either on the other side of the world, or in the ghetto across town?

There is nothing worse than a spoiled person who does not realize they have an exploitative relationship with the world. They think that prosperity is something that happens with minimal effort just because they were born into the driver class of a tyrannical system. They don’t realize the extent to which their prosperity is the result of the efforts of others.

Manipulation often takes on an appearance of positivity when critical thinking is undervalued. Just because someone is outwardly, superficially good to others, doesn’t mean they are a good person. Most people will act like saints when they want something out of someone, but this doesn’t mean they aren’t actually devils inside, wolves in sheeps’ clothing. Even someone who is outwardly positive may not have good intentions.

Also, actions perceived to be “negative” can have a positive impact on society. Killing Hitler, for example, is generally seen as a positive action, even though it was a brutal act of war, as the overall effect on the greater good was positive, in that it was in everyone’s interest to have a world with no Nazi genocide. On the other hand, supporting an over eater, while outwardly positive, may have a negative effect in the form of enabling an overweight person to put their health at risk with poor eating habits. Often times, people are spared the truth, because keeping them in the dark is seen as “for their own good”. This is really just a chickenshit way of avoiding confrontation, as keeping someone in an inaccurate worldview is NEVER for their own good, and can often be quite destructive to that person’s relationship with reality.

A person who “goes with the flow” will usually be rewarded in modern society, even if that flow is wrong. Those who stand up for themselves or others will often be saddled with stigmas and burdens by a system and a society that deliberately seeks to quiet the critics, in order to keep the gluttonous orgy of Western civilization going. This is why the Romans crucified Jesus, people who refuse to snitch do time in prison, and honest ethical people often find themselves in poverty. Civil disobedience and activism are often seen as valuing one’s impact on their community moreso than their own personal fate.

And so, what can the cerebral, capable, morally upright people do to combat this domination by psychopaths via their overpopulation and construction of power structures to marginalize and exploit us? Well for one thing, we must examine ourselves, and route out selfishness. Meditation and self-reflection will bring about a better understanding of ourselves and eachother. But this needs to be combined with an obsession with fairness, equality, and social justice. Knowing that social conscience is deliberately being punished, starved out, and bred out by the system, we must make efforts to cultivate it within ourselves and eachother, and whenever possible, institutionalize it! Quite simply, Americans need to change their values, and what is valued by them.

What is more important to you? Being rich or being ethical and morally correct? Your standard of living and comfort, or your lofty ideals? And how far are you willing to go to promote basic morality and pro-social behavior, even in the face of material and criminal punishment, as well as social ostracization? How much are you willing to sacrifice for what you believe in? These are questions we must all ask ourselves, and if we are to have and value integrity, we must respond in a certain way. Pro-social behavior in the form of cooperative initiatives for genuine positivity are important to the survival and prosperity of the human race, and should be valued more highly than the riches of Croesus. The more people take a stand against the materialist, tyrannical system, the less it will be able to sustain itself via our compliance.

But there are many self-serving philosophies that humans cling to as an excuse to shirk their social responsibilities, and many of them are spiritual or religious as well as political and economic. The idea of Justice in the afterlife is one, as is karma, the idea that “what goes around comes around” eventually. Neither one of these ideas is based in any evidence whatsoever, but they conveniently provide us rationalization to look the other way from social and systemic injustice. But what if there is no God or afterlife? What if we must do Justice NOW, or good deeds will go forever unrewarded and bad deeds forever unpunished? Gandhi himself thought that the Hindu caste system was inhumane and unjust, even as Westerners use their poor understanding of ascetic Eastern philosophies to rationalize letting injustices lie.

Perhaps dogmatic morality should be abandoned in favor of a more pragmatic situational ethics. Maybe victims shouldn’t be blamed, they should be recompensed by appeasing their personal sense of justice and restoring what was stripped from them. Promoting social justice is just as important as ending systemic injustice. What we need is a system that encourages good behavior instead of bad behavior, while at the same time treating social problems as public health issues rather than private shames and public melodramas. But public attitudes need to change from their current lassiez-faire state. Such attitudes only cause the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, both materially AND socially.

There are also a lot of victim blaming and “God only helps those who help themselves” type mentalities that help people not only rationalize their selfishness, but hold others at fault for being too selfless or idealistic. Often times, when an individual has a problem, society brainstorms a way to blame the victim for his own problem instead of helping him solve it. This is social negligence, plain and simple. Society should exist to support the individual as much as the individual supports society, otherwise the relationship between the constituent and his group becomes exploitative. And there are many problems which can only be solved with cooperation, therefore it is the fault of the uncooperative that problems remain unsolved. And yet uncooperative people will often blame others for their personal problems even if they couldn’t possibly solve those problems themselves. And too often in America, problems are exploited rather than solved.

These are the attitudes that need to be fought against, otherwise the human race will find itself overrun by psychopaths and their bad behavior, pillaging, raping, and hurting those of us who still have feelings. Humans, especially those in the free world, need to learn self-restraint, willpower, and sensitivity to eachother’s needs, otherwise, we will destroy ourselves and eachother with selfishness and greed. The world will become more dog-eat-dog, and society will give way to mere chaos. And life will become a race to the bottom, where only the most ruthless sociopaths win. The anti-psycho, pro-social attitude is the progressive attitude. This is what separates humans from animals: the higher conscious will. The drive to become better than human.

I never wanted to be one of those tinfoil-hatted lunatics, claiming that both major US political parties are ruled by the same unseen hand. And I’m not. After being conservative in my youth and liberal in my young adulthood, I ended up abandoning both parties for an entirely different reason: I have found that both major political parties have very little to do with systems of belief about the way the world should be, and are instead simply consortiums of special interests.

You might say I’m a dreamer. But unlike the old Beatles lyric, increasingly, I feel like I AM the only one! The rise of “non-ideological” politics (ie cross-partisan compromise in the name of getting things that both sides want done) has really killed the idealism that American politics used to be all about. Indeed, touting oneself as “non-ideological” has actually become a selling point that helps politicians get elected, in what seems like a race to the bottom, to see who can sell out the core values of their party first.

It’s as if two people were having an argument, and a third party came in and said “You’re both wrong for different reasons and in different ways.” But then, after that third party left the room, the two arguing parties simply agreed to be wrong together, rather than correcting their problems.

But before we can get into where I’m at now, we need to establish my background. Don’t worry, I haven’t lived a life that was even remotely normal, so it shouldn’t be too boring.

I was born to a mixed-class marriage that didn’t quite work out. This put me in the awkward position of bouncing between neighborhoods, households, and social classes, in a joint custody agreement that ultimately gave me a pretty unique perspective, both politically and economically. On my father’s side, there was the privilege of the upper economic class. Dad was a Cold War hero turned civil litigator with ties to the intelligence community, the international banking conspiracy, petrochemical industry, GOP, Bush family, etc… Our season ticket seats to the Texas Rangers were just a stone’s throw away from Bush Jr.’s himself, back when he owned the team, and he and my father used to exchange meaningful glances that betrayed their collusion in various matters. Mom, on the other hand, was a devout Lutheran liberal artist, with a masters degree in ancient religious music, whose beautiful soprano voice made church services wonderful, even if it didn’t make her much money.

I first became politically aware at age 14, when I started watching the Rush Limbaugh show. Not realizing what a douchey loser Rush was at the time, I simply thought it was really novel that someone could make a living out of criticizing the President, as I am a bit of a contrarian. Clinton would come on TV spouting some meaningless rubbish about “building a bridge to the year 2000” (I never could figure out why you would need to build a bridge to something that would inevitably happen anyway), and then Limbaugh would deliver his rebuttal. The little anarchist in me thought this was just wonderful, and my libertarian bent continued throughout my teens, with all the typical trappings: I read Ayn Rand, PJ O’Rourke, and Milton Friedman, I thought taxes were too high and welfare programs encouraged bad behavior, etc, ad nauseum. Dad encouraged this, and Mom just rolled her eyes and endured it. I was a regular Alex P Keaton of the 90’s.

But then I started smoking weed. Not only did this get me financially cut off from my parents, as soon as they were legally able to do so, but it also broadened my perspective quite a bit. I started attending a community college, and, for the first time, was exposed to the lower economic classes. I very quickly observed that these people I had been so prejudiced against in my youth were just as smart and worthy as me, they were simply underprivileged. This was right around 9-11 and the first Bush Jr. term. The events of the times and my own personal path through life exposed me to the utter failure of Republican policies and ideologies. Trickle-down economics and deregulation caused major economic crises. Hawkish and exploitative foreign policy caused terrorist attacks on American soil.

And as these national melodramas unfolded, so did the melodramas of my personal life. Financial hardship in college made me hate Ronald Reagan for his “Tough Love” parenting philosophy, which works really well, if you want your cut-off children to become drug dealers and prostitutes. Then there was the unsettling realization that my father basically traded dear old mom in for a trophy wife. And my exposure to the upper crust of the GOP (and especially their spoiled brat pack yuppie-larvae offspring, whose privilege I despised) made me acutely aware of their moral hypocrisies, best embodied by the phrase: “Preach to the masses, dine with the classes.” (there should also be something about a Gordon Gekko coke orgy in there)

And so, by my mid-twenties, I was really guzzling that Democrat Kool-Aid. I wanted the war to end. I wanted racial, gender, and economic equality. I wanted social justice and the end of capitalist exploitation. I wanted tolerance of cultural diversity, a goal I feel includes the legalization of all recreational drugs. I wanted wasteful, cut-throat competitions to give way to fruitful collaborations and peaceful co-operation. And I still want these things today, even if I lack confidence in the Democrats’ ability to deliver them.

But more than any of these purely political concerns, I had kind of a spiritual awakening during this time. I had previously been theologically an agnostic and philosophically a Taoist, but somewhere in my mid-twenties, ritual use of entheogenic substances caused me to become a Gnostic Christian, morally at least. I’m still a big fan of hard science, but I also believe Jesus was a great moral teacher. And this was when I became a proponent of an all-inclusive, transparent society based on love, honesty, and acceptance, rather than a materialistic society based on exclusion, secrets, and lies. So, through my conversion to liberal Christianity, and what I saw as a correct and enlightened interpretation of both the canonical and Gnostic gospels, I became an ideological liberal.

And this all came to fruition in the form of the first and only vote I have ever cast: for Barack Obama. He was the first politician the American system has ever produced that I genuinely felt was worthy of my vote, and the waiting in line at 7AM that casting it entailed. He had it all going for him: the perspective he had from his struggle against racial adversity, his coolness, his intelligence and capability. Never have I felt someone to be more qualified to be President, and I was very proud to cast my very first vote for him. There were those that said my first vote should have been for Ron Paul, but this is how I feel about him.

But now, in Obama’s second term, I don’t have quite as much faith in him. For one thing, Obamacare entailed too much compromise. What should have been the product of ideological hardlining was instead the product of backroom deals. For another thing, I was not happy about Obama’s opportunism in pushing a gun control agenda in the wake of public shootings. Obama’s phony tears seemed very disingenuous to me, especially considering that he sends predator drones that kill children all the time without shedding any tears, because that isn’t an opportunity for public posturing. As a liberal Texan, I favor the Swiss model of gun control: have no standing military, but issue every citizen an automatic weapon and train them in their use in public schools. For a third thing, even though I support gay marriage, I really don’t think the government should be involved in any marriage, and I feel like it was just a crumb tossed to social liberals in order to distract us from more important battles being woefully lost. Finally, I was just as angry as everyone else about PRISM, and government intrusion into privacy.

But this blog isn’t a referendum on Obama, who I think has done a pretty good job overall despite some of my personal disagreements with a few of his policies. What really talked me out of being a Democrat, were Democrats! Not the politicians, but the voters themselves, whom I encountered in everyday life. You see, in keeping with being a born-again liberal, I moved from Dallas, a very neo-conservative town where good ol Dubya chose to retire, to Austin, the liberal Mecca of Texas, and started my career in software. I was very excited to join a liberal community for the first time ever.

But then I went through a pretty brutal divorce, the details of which court orders will not allow me to discuss. Suffice to say, I was betrayed and abandoned. Venturing out into the nightlife for the first time in 5 years, I thought, surely, my new liberal community will catch me before I slip through the cracks. But alas, xenophobic Austinites dropped the ball. I soon learned that there is no community here, just cliques. And people tend to have this really negligent, rather than progressive, attitude about social problems, best exemplified by the traffic problem. Even though the roads are jam packed, no one wants to build new roads, because then that would encourage “more outsiders” to move here and use the roads.

My exposure to a town full of Democrats run wild has not left a positive impression of the party on my mind. I always considered the Democratic party to be the party of social conscience and responsibility. But in reality, liberals can be just as spoiled, selfish, bigoted, and entitled as conservatives, they simply use different ideologies to rationalize their socially negligent, greedy, prejudiced behavior. It was as if I was living in a society devoid of compassion or empathy, despite being nominally extremely liberal. This social ostracization even included being fired from several jobs, not because of incompetence, but because I didn’t “fit in” with the corporate culture.

I was horribly mistreated by women. Not just one or two, but the entire female community. They lead me on, deliberately insulted me, talked behind my back, and were generally insensitive to my plight as a middle-aged single man. I put my best foot forward, was genuine and earnest in my quest to find my soul-mate, and the women of Austin laughed at me, the way a jock would laugh at a cripple. I really tried to make the best of a crummy situation, thinking that surely being single in a town full of liberal college girls could be fun, right? But young liberal women are not as fun as stereotypes would suggest. It seems to me they are just kind of stuck up and over-entitled. I actually wrote a whole other blog about this, so I won’t go into it too much here.

There seemed to be the usual steady stream of broke losers trying to exploit me for a hand-out, coming in and out of my life. I had grown used to that in Dallas. “I take care of you when you’re down, you take care of me when I’m down.” But by age 30, I began to feel kinda “in the red” in this whole scheme. Like I had put in more to the community than I had gotten out of it, forgiving debts, allowing people to crash, giving rides, etc… It all added up to me feeling more like an exploited benefactor than an actual friend to the community.

There was simply no tolerance for dissent or critical thinking in the groupthinking liberal enclaves I attempted to frequent. I was discriminated against by happy fascists who sought to eliminate from their in-group anyone “negative” in order to keep them from “ruining their vibe”. These spoiled, selfish brats, who were coddled by their parents and sheltered from reality, had this rose-colored view of the world, and anyone who didn’t fit into that world view was simply labelled “one of those negative people who just wants to be miserable”. (I’ve never personally met anyone who wanted to be miserable and I think that’s a total cop-out) There was just so much revisionism and censorship in the common attitudes of the liberals I would meet, it really shattered my illusion of the down-to-earth, non-judgmental, let’s-roll-up-our-sleeves-and-build-houses-for-the-under-privileged liberal. Instead there were just these petty, spoiled, groupthinking A-Listers.

In other words, I looked back and forth at the conservative pigs and the liberal people, and could not tell the difference. I learned that discrimination, bigotry, exclusion… these are things practiced by Republicans and Democrats alike. Selection bias, confirmation bias, and false consensus effect are cognitive errors that plague all humans, regardless of political affiliation. Ad hominems are all too common when trying to have discussions, even with supposedly open-minded, liberal Austinites. Lots of psychological projection. And in the end, Austin might as well have been Nazi Germany to me, simply because it is so much easier for the community to eliminate “negative people” than it is for them to eliminate negativity from people.

Maybe it’s because Texans just fail at being liberal, but Austin seems like a Libertarian town to me. Or maybe Austinites just have an 8th grade understanding of what it means to be a liberal, mistaking liberalism for mere promiscuity and drug use. It was disturbing to hear young hippie girls parrot this libertarian ideology at me that sounded like something my 65-year-old super GOP father would say. Then you had all the solipsist American Buddhists and Hindus, practicing the exactly wrong Western interpretations of these Eastern ascetic philosophies in what I personally see as disrespectful sacrilege. Then you had the Rule of Attraction idiots who have deified Oprah. Just a whole lot of victim-blaming and social negligence going on, and coming from the types of people you wouldn’t expect. The moral I learned was that people have a wide variety of self-serving philosophies that they use to rationalize shirking their social responsibilities.

In a debate about cultural tolerance, I was told, by a gay person, that “liberals are losers”, which I thought was a strange way to show gratitude to organizations like the Students For a Democratic Society, who marched for gay rights back in the Dark Ages when sodomy was against the law. When I tried to argue that my taste in intoxicants was just as genetically inherent as his sexual preference, he shook the idea off. “Drug use is a choice,” he said, “Homosexuality isn’t.” My counter argument that having gay sex and using drugs were both choices, but wanting to do these things was not a choice, was not well-received. Living in Austin has awakened me to the existence of the gay Republican. There seems to be no solidarity between gays and the rest of the liberal agenda. This I find disturbing, because at one time, their lifestyle was against the law, too, and yet they seem to have no sympathy for other oppressed cultures. Their economic ideologies are surprisingly laissez-faire.

I started hanging out with this dreadlocked Rasta man who worked at my neighborhood head shop. I had a crush on a girl he knew, but she wanted nothing to do with me. After expressing my lament of this fact, he told me that I have a “sense of entitlement”. This is coming from a guy who bangs more chicks in a year than I have in my entire life. Also, I hate to say it, but Obama, this guy was not. He was basically the embodiment of all the worst African-American stereotypes: He was a lazy, slacking dopesmoker who spent most of his time macking on Suicide Girls in their internet chat room. So, for him to say I had a sense of entitlement was really hypocritical, and a perfect example of the type of default liberal attitude you encounter in a college town, where it’s always the white man’s fault, even if it isn’t. I had a few rich college girls tell me to “check your privilege” too, and I also wrote a blog about that.

And then this stuck up ho model basically told me the same shit! “You need to quit pursuing women who want nothing to do with you just because you think women owe you something!” she said. Bitch, how the Hell are you gonna tell me that I have a sense of entitlement when you married for money?

But the culmination of this was when I went to a women’s rights protest. Standing in the middle of all these women who were fighting draconian restrictions on abortion access, I suddenly asked myself, “Why am I here?” And I realized, that I was there because I believe in things. I have ideals. But most of the women were there purely out of self interest. The majority of them knew fuck-all about being liberal. They would probably all fail a quiz on Karl Marx’s Das Capital, Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, or Naomi Klien’s Shock Doctrine. Texas is the home of the conservative feminist, so the women’s right’s protest in Austin was like standing in a sea of Ayn Rands.

This made me feel like a schmuck, because if I were to vote strictly out of self-interest, I would be voting Republican. After all, that is the party for hopeless romantic white, male, skilled workers with respectable salaries. But I vote Democrat, not out of self-interest, but because I believe in things like equality, fairness, peace, justice, and love. And yet, in a town full of Democrats, I felt inferior, the victim of bad justice, not at peace but torn by conflict, and unloved. In a town where special interests are put on a pedestal, my vanilla white-bread sensibilities didn’t seem to fit in at all. If you are gay or transexual, Austin is a wonderful town in which to be social, but don’t try to bring your heterosexuality out in public, because it is not considered acceptable. When expressing discomfort with my male gender role in the wake of divorce-related trust issues, I had women chomping at the bit to convert me to transexualism and do my make-up, but none simply willing to drop their pretense of entitlement and give me a little TLC on the house in recognition of my hard-luck case.

And that’s when I realized that the Democratic Party is made up of loosely-affiliated special interests, most of which don’t even get along. For most Democrats, membership in the party is more about “getting theirs” than any kind of liberal or progressive ideology. The feminists tend to be racist, materialist, and classist, and the minorities tend to be misogynistic Europhobes. And who am I? Well I’m just that schmucky white guy paying the bill, I guess. I don’t think I’m the first ideological white male liberal to be driven out of the liberal community by self-centered special interests who only think of white men when it is time to blame someone for something that went wrong, or pay the tab for a new entitlement program. And I want to ask them all: “Hey, I know you have a lot to gain from your political affiliation, but what have you sacrificed for it?” Do people even sacrifice themselves for things in which they believe these days, or is that just an antiquated notion to kids?

This is the same as Republicans running deficits and eroding civil liberties. It’s hypocrisy, plain and simple, and it bugs the shit out of me. Over-entitled, special fucking interests. On the right, you have the Banksters, the Military-Industrialists, Big Oil, and Big Religion. But on the left you have Feminazis, Minorities, Big Agriculture, and Government Bureaucracy. Nobody is acting on beliefs in their ideals anymore, it’s all just special interests. I always thought that equality is a general interest, but nobody really cares about equality anymore. They are too busy looking out for themselves. There is no liberal solidarity in this cauldron of special interests.

Also, it seemed like the liberals wanted to lean on the government and institutions for everything. In the wake of horrible depression, I very badly needed friends and community, but in a town full of strangers, I was instead told to “go see a shrink” by people that “didn’t have time for my drama”. Or all the people who told me to bang a prostitute or go to a strip club, even though the idea of sex for sale horribly offends my liberal sensibilities. As if to say, “We have a system in place for people like you, so that I personally don’t have to sully myself with your dirt.” This was not the kind of compassionate, all-inclusive society I had in mind when I started drinking the liberal Kool-Aid. This was Not in My Backyard Syndrome at its most ludicrous. This was justice and medicine administered by a cold-hearted government system, not a community. (an aside for the concerned, I AM seeing a shrink. It’s not helping)

I think it was probably when I was doing time for drug possession in Travis County Jail that I realized, I’m not a Democrat. I’m a liberal anarchist. I don’t believe in this whole system of institutionalized bigotry and oppression that people can turn on eachother. And when I got out of jail, did anyone thank me for not snitching? No, they avoided me like the plague and assumed I was a rat. So I came to this crazy conclusion that we need less government, but more community.

I don’t think this country needs another bailout, social welfare program, or government spy agency. What we need, is a social movement based on goodwill. Because it seems to me like people have just forgotten how to be good to eachother and that’s the real problem. Modern society is just too dog eat dog. What we need are less Al Gores, sitting in their mansions telling everyone not to be wasteful, and more Mother Teresas, who help the poor at their own expense. If there is anything that the two-party system has taught me, it’s that selfish whores run the world, and of these they call the men Republicans and the women Democrats. Unless you want to be a selfish pig or a hapless victim, there is no major political party for you.

I’m still a liberal, mind you. I still think that the idea that competition brings out the best in people is wrong and will cause the extinction of mankind if we let it. I still believe in peace, love, science, freedom, and equality. But I don’t think I’ll vote anymore, Democrat or Republican. Instead, I’m all about green parties and black blocks and anarchist bicycle shops and hippie communes where they grow their own food. I work at a software company that encourages self-management and collaboration. And I believe that revolution is coming. But it won’t be red shirts versus blue shirts, it will be a revolution of life against non-life, goodwill against selfishness, and accomplishment against regression.

“Check your privilege”. If you live close to a college campus, or are a poster in online forums that center around political debate (such as Reddit), then this phrase should not be new to you. It has become the rallying cry of special interests typically associated with the mainstream American Left. And yet, ironically, many of those who tend to use this phrase have utterly failed to check their own privilege.

Now, let me first preface what I’m sure many will choose to perceive as a misogynist rant with a few acknowledgments: I am an ideological, bleeding-heart liberal who believes in freedom and equality insomuch as they can coexist. When abortion rights recently came under fire in Texas, I stood with Wendy and marched around the Capitol building until my throat was sore and my feet felt like they were going to fall off, in part because, as someone who seeks to avoid parenthood at all costs, access to family planning is as much in my interest as any female’s. I acknowledge that there are religious and social conservative interests (some would go so far as to call them patriarchal interests, but truthfully, there are both men AND women involved) in both the public and private sector, that seek to eliminate abortion, and I have spent a lifetime fighting them on general principle, just as I have fought against racial discrimination, unnecessary wars, and classist economic inequality, not out of self-interest (if my primary concern was self-interest, I would be a Republican), but out of ideological conviction.

But just because these religious fundamentalist and social conservative forces exist, and sometimes manage to obtain and wield economic and political power, does not necessarily mean that American society as a whole is inherently prejudiced against women. Quite the contrary, actually. This feminist mythology of “patriarchy” is in the same vein as tinfoil-hatted crackpottery against “the system”, which assumes the government is some kind of universally bigoted, tyrannical force, rather than the uncoordinated mess of bureaucracies manned by autonomous individuals with radically conflicting agendas it actually is.

Female delusions of patriarchal persecution notwithstanding, in reality, the past fifty years have seen vast improvements in the plight of the Western female to a point where it makes female complaints about systemic injustice harder and harder to take seriously, at least when applied to American society. Darfurs and Saudi Arabias aside, in the first world, women tend to enjoy a certain amount of privilege of which they either conveniently aren’t aware or choose not to acknowledge for the sake of argument. So let’s take a look, shall we?

Education and Employment:

“Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.

As of [2010], women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.

An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce. Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they’d lost—but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction.”

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/308654/
(The preceding section is actually a direct quote of a woman, from her article about how liberated women should stop defining themselves in terms of marriage, and embrace a life of youthful promiscuity until a point in midlife, when their age-deteriorated looks make marriage a more practical option for fulfilling their romantic needs)

Spending:
One of the reasons for the recent advances American women have made is very simple: A ton of money is spent on women every year! By and large, more money is spent on women than on men. By everyone. Suitors, governments, families, and the private sector. There are more federal programs earmarked specifically for women than there are for men. It costs more to raise a daughter than it does to raise a son. And female health care is more expensive. “Helping women overcome adversity” is also a very popular initiative for expensive government and corporate campaigns and programs with no male counterparts. For one of many examples, when statistical analysis of standardized testing showed that girls were flagging in math and science, and boys were struggling with reading, a special educational program was created and funded by legislation specifically geared to help girls be better at math and science, but no corresponding program was created to help boys be better at reading.

This is all due to overcompensation for obsolete stereotypes. Because girls are stereotypically perceived to be “weaker”, they are given more assistance than boys, who are expected to “be strong” and “tough it out” (with less support from their families and social institutions). Over time, this overcompensation has stacked up to create a significant advantage for women. And most women will act the part just to keep the special treatment coming. When you factor in the money that is spent on women in the course of dating, the old stereotype about women being money pits is not just anecdotally true, but statistically true as well.

And what kind of precedent is set by raising young women in this manner? A terrible one! Privilege spoils, power corrupts, and when you treat someone with kid gloves for their entire life, the effect on their character is not often positive. When you examine the systemic benefits of being raised female, you begin to understand the ridiculous sense of entitlement that many American women have. Because women have always been given special treatment, not only do they begin to expect it, but they have difficulty understanding the perspectives of anyone who HASN’T been given special treatment, in what I like to call the “Let them eat cake” effect. As privilege increases, the capacity to empathize decreases, and this explains why modern women are no longer the nurturing healers they used to be.

Inequality Under the Law:
Recently, PFC Bradley Manning was sentenced to a very long jail term for treason regarding his dispersal of classified documents to Wikileaks. Upon sentencing, Manning revealed that s/he is actually a transgendered male who prefers to identify as a female. Perhaps it would have been more wise for Manning to reveal his female gender identity BEFORE sentencing, as statistically, women receive shorter jail sentences than men, even when convicted of the same crimes.

Again, it’s that idea that women are weaker, and “can’t take” the punishment, or will somehow suffer more than men for it. This is just one of many ways that women are insulated from the consequences of their own actions by a society that puts them on a pedestal. The thing is, this isn’t the only area of society where this is happening. It’s happening everywhere, but the court system is where it is documented and statistically apparent.

This isn’t the only preferential treatment that the American justice system bestows upon the female gender. Women are also statistically more likely to prevail in court, whether it is a criminal matter, divorce, custody battle, restraining order, or simple financial dispute. These statistics are symptomatic of the fact that women elicit more sympathy than men, something which might be explained by the next section.

Women are, by and large, considered by humanity as a whole to be more attractive than men. While men tend to find only women attractive (besides the 5% homosexual statistical anomaly), women tend to find both men and women attractive. This means that women simply have more cross-gender mass appeal than men! Inherently, women are more physically attractive and hence have a greater social influence. This is a fact known by advertisers, which is why advertisements more frequently feature female models and spokespeople than males. Females are more attractive and more inherently persuasive than men. Think of it this way: would you be quicker to crush, a cockroach or a kitten? Obviously, the kitten is “cuter”, which is why they are kept as pets, as opposed to uglier animals, which are considered vermin and exterminated. Women complain about professional limitations, but really, given an equal skillset, who do you think is more likely to get hired? An attractive young woman or an ugly old man? Who would you rather be in the cubicle next to you?

How many attractive men do you know who have modelling headshots on their instagram? How many male go-go dancers are there? How about male strippers or prostitutes? Women simply have an easier time taking advantage of their looks, in some cases even making a living off of them. Most men simply do not have that option, no matter how handsome they may be. Western society simply places more value on female beauty than male handsomeness.

No wonder why women have more sex than men, and with more partners! That seems like a nice little perk to being female, doesn’t it? Not only do they have more sex, but it takes a lot less effort for them to get it. A woman will be extended social opportunities just for being inherently attractive, even if she has no other merit. Just look at this terrible online dating profile that was created as a joke, and yet still received over 150 messages in less than 24 hours! Most men would be happy to get 150 messages in a year. And of those 150, many are likely to be well-connected, rich, or able to offer the woman some kind opportunity, even legitimate job opportunities, which are only available to a man who works hard and has capability.

Obviously the right to choose whether to carry to term or terminate a pregnancy is something that women have been fighting to preserve for some time. But shouldn’t an individual (male or female) be held responsible for the consequences of their own choices? And yet even as women have fought for their reproductive rights, they have also stuck men with the bill. Not only that, but since the final say in the decision to reproduce is the legal power of the female, then don’t females technically bear responsibility for overpopulation? The biological imperative to reproduce is something hormonally felt by women and not men, and marriage, often painted as an evil, patriarchal institution by free-wheeling women in their twenties, is just as often considered a means to get men to fund the fulfilment of their maternal instinct by women in their 30’s. In other words, why would a woman settle down unless there was some benefit to be derived from it, IE: financial security and a good father for her offspring?

Abuse and Infidelity Perpetrated by Females:

As women have come up in Western society, so has female abuse and infidelity. It was once thought that men had a fear of commitment, but as the balance of social power has shifted towards women, we now see that fear of commitment is not a function of gender, but rather one of social power. The more social options one has, the less willing they are to commit, male or female.

The problem with female infidelity is mainly that there is no sympathy for its victims. In fact, men who are cheated on are more likely to get blame than sympathy. If a woman cheats on a man, this calls into question his virility and adequacy. If a man cheats on a woman, he is simply just another sexist pig.

Possibly the most disturbing is the trend of women perpetrating violence against men, reports of which are not often taken seriously. Legally, a man is on very precarious ground even if attempting to defend himself from such an attack. And there certainly is no safety net for battered males or single fathers, no community outreach shelters or support groups. Perhaps this, among other things, is the reason why men are statistically four times more likely to commit suicide than women.

Existing social conventions flat-out give women a ridiculous social advantage, and beautiful women tend to put the “socio” in “socio-economic inequality”. Modern feminism has often sought to abolish female gender roles, even while holding men to theirs. Most women would consider the idea that cooking and cleaning are female duties to be horribly offensive to their feminist sensibilities. Indeed, it seems that any attempt made by men to define what a woman should be is vehemently resisted by women. And yet these same women have no problem defining male roles and what men should be.

Probably one of the male gender roles most abhorred by most men is that of initiating romance, mostly because feminists have drilled into us a kind of guilt and learned helplessness about it. If you hit on a girl and she’s into it, great. But woe be the man who makes an advance on a woman who isn’t feeling it. Most women have not learned the art of graceful rejection, and thus will heap a man with shame just for trying. Over time, a man with bad enough luck will simply quit trying, relegating himself to loneliness and the negation of his sexual needs. Often, men are chastised by women simply for making an attempt at romance (or going about it the “wrong way” according to women), but a man who keeps to himself will find he is settling for nothing! After all, how often do you hear of women asking men to dinner in contrived attempts to get in our pants?

What women tend to do, is passive-aggressively send signals to men in order to entice them, instead of pursuing men directly. This is because women don’t want the risk or responsibility of initiating romance, so when it turns sour, they can always say “this whole thing was your doing”. And this convention of bait and reel, enticing men to pursue, is quite deliberate on the part of females. It’s how they get men to spend time, money, and energy on them, in a kind of romantic ju-jitsu. Although women like to paint romance as the man being in control, this is only superficially true. The entire point of traditional romance is to make men subservient to women: asking them out, buying them candy and flowers, getting down on one knee to propose… The whole point is to strip men of their dignity and exploit them. The male role in courtship is the romantic equivalent of a fraternity hazing ritual, complete with paying ridiculous dues.

Think about it this way: If you were an alien from another planet with no knowledge of human social conventions, and you saw a man on bent knee, begging a woman for permission to spend money on her, who would you think was the dominant gender? What about the fact that men fight and die in resource wars while women sit pretty at home leading much easier lives? Even though men have a more robust physical system than women, they live shorter lives on average because they put more stress on their bodies for the benefit of their communities and are more likely to meet violent, unnatural ends.

This is all because of the male gender role. We are expected to “be tough” and endure hardships that are deemed “too much” for poor, defenseless women. And this isn’t just regarding physical toughness, but emotional toughness as well. Basically, men are encouraged to be dominant, aggressive, and emotionally insensitive, because it’s really the only way to fulfill our basic needs. Women are terrible at supporting sensitive males, mostly because they expect men to be slaves to female emotions, not exploring their own. It’s not quite that women are sociopaths, who have no emotions, but they assign their own emotions more importance than men’s.

What happens when one of your male friends complains of being single on Facebook? At best, they are ignored, and at worst they are called “whiny”, “needy”, etc, in attempts by society to manipulate their egos and negate their emotional needs. Women who complain of loneliness on the internet, on the other hand, are inundated with invitations to dinner. Over time, this social advantage piles up to make women the social hubs they can sometimes be, and men just spokes on the wheel. It has gotten to a point where men simply aren’t allowed to have feelings, and I sincerely doubt that most women could handle the male plight of applying for love and being rejected, as opposed to women, who enjoy the much better position of having their pick of a pool of applicants.

Trying to explain the plight of a single man to a woman is like trying to explain the plight of a person dying of thirst to a person who is drowning. Women complain of being inundated with unwanted sexual advances, without even stopping to consider what it would be like to not have any social opportunities except for the ones you create for yourself. They can’t imagine what it is like to not be invited anywhere, not be given free admission or drinks, because then you would be just another sausage at the sausage fest. Trust me, having to turn down a few people you don’t find attractive is worth the inconvenience, considering your alternative is to play the other position, face a lot of rejection, and yet still be expected to either keep making advances or die alone. And as long as men are footing the bill for any attempt at romance, promiscuity will always be in the female interest.

A woman’s virginity is highly prized and sought after. This creates a privilege in the form of many unsuccessful attempts to woo a virgin, usually at the expense of men. Conversely, there is no male virgin privilege, as a man’s virginity is not valued. This leads to disrespect of a man’s honor. If a man were to have sex with a woman and then disappear, this would generally be considered “taking advantage” or “disrespecting her honor”. But if a woman does the same to a man, not only would he not be taken seriously if he complained, but he is actually supposed to enjoy it! This is a disgusting double-standard, which is especially hypocritical insomuch as men who have “too much baggage” or a romantic history with too many partners can be castigated and ostracized by the same female community that repeatedly, purposefully jilted them.

Rose-colored Lens of Femininity

Many women I have met tend to have kind of a naive outlook on life. They think that the world is a better place than it actually is, that people are nicer than they actually are. This is because their beauty, desirability, and privilege have colored their perception of reality and the way they are treated. Because social convention requires that women be wooed, women often tend to only be exposed to the best sides of people. Whereas the poor, the ugly, the underprivileged, and the male are exposed to a totally different side of people. Because no one is trying to win them over and they might as well be invisible. Or worse yet, they might be a target of exploitation because no one respects them.

Contrary to popular female belief, there is no brotherhood among men, and men are probably even more prone to disrespect eachother than they are to disrespect women, whose favor they are expected to curry in order to get romance. So this difference in perspective can often cause women to have unrealistic opinions about the nature of society and people. When they meet a realist who sees world for what it truly is, they tend to think of this person as “negative” or “judgmental”. But in reality, their privilege has simply disconnected them from reality.

Demonizing Men

In addition to being charged with “toughness”, men are also perceived to be less moral than women. It can sometimes be hard for people to believe that a woman lied, stole, was violent, or behaved unethically. But the truth is, women have statistically demonstrated a growing propensity for violence, dishonesty, and promiscuity. And yet these are things more commonly attributed to men than women. The stereotypical man is perceived to be this violent, aggressive sex fiend, and indeed, those men who don’t fit that stereotype often have their virility questioned by the female community.

So in any dispute between a man and a woman, more often the woman’s word is valued more highly, which is probably why women do better in court. As I mentioned before, this is a general social trend which is exemplified in particular in the legal system. Judges and juries are humans and make the same cognitive errors in judgment that all humans do. What’s sad is that mistreatment of young men is rationalized by the sexist crimes of their grandfathers. It’s passive-aggressive transference when women mad at Rick Perry take it out on some jaded divorcee just because he’s angry he got cheated on by a generation of women run wild. Male-bashing and blaming men for female problems are becoming more common, as are false allegations of rape! And speaking of rape, thanks to the Prison-Industrial Complex, America is the only country in the world where more men are raped every year than women! So you have more women graduating from college, more women becoming lawyers and judges, and then, they put men in a situation where they will be anally raped. Justice is served!

Basically, we are coming to a point in time in which the feminist special interest is beginning to come into conflict with the basic tenets of liberalism, which are: equality, compassion, open-mindedness, social inclusion, sharing, and LOVE! Yes, that’s right, even Jesus, one of the very first liberals ever, was a huge proponent of the crazy ideas that everyone needs and deserves love, that lack of love is the source of all humanity’s problems, and love cures all. But we are facing a generation of females who, while sexually available (for a price), are incapable of love.

This is why feminists are often called “feminazis”. Because when feminism devolves into petty female chauvinism, feminists aren’t liberal anymore. They have adopted a self-serving philosophy, are acting purely in self-interest and have abandoned liberal ideology, becoming conservative feminists a la Ayn Rand. These women have no interest in equality, but rather, domination. If it weren’t for the Democrats’ sympathies to their cause, they would all be lassiez-faire capitalists. Female chauvinists have simply become too selfish to rightfully be considered liberals. And given that most masculist complaints of modern women bear a lot of resemblance to feminist complaints of men fifty years ago, it is safe to say that feminists have become the very monsters they originally set out to fight.

These are complaints about women’s social and increasingly systemic advantages that most men would agree to, but few men would want to sign their name to. That’s because they don’t want to be ostracized by women as a ‘misogynist’, which has become a catch-all label for anyone that opposes the will of women, ever. But that’s OK, because I didn’t write this blog to become popular. I wrote it as a canned argument against the next trustifarian hippie-crit girl who wags her finger at my working class liberal male ass, urging me to “Check my privilege”.

Having escaped the confines of a dead-end common-law marriage that entailed abuse, infidelity, betrayal, and abandonment, I have been single and looking for the past couple of years. Being a pretty astute and perceptive observer, I have noticed several things about the women in my community that I don’t like. There are some women who love to label any man who challenges their will, no matter how hypocritical or irrational it may be, a misogynist, but I feel that this is akin to saying that someone who opposes Israel’s conquest of Palestine is an anti-Semite. And the truth is, most men would probably agree with what I am saying, but they are too afraid to speak up about it because they don’t want to be socially ostracized. And so, I have decided to record my complaints about women here, much like Martin Luther nailed his complaints about the Catholic Church to their door several hundred years ago. Most of these are based on one or more real-life women I’ve met in my life:

1. The gold-digging tease. I can’t think of any crueler way for a pretty girl to treat a single man than to lead him on, pretend to be interested in him when you are not, and entice him to waste his time, money, and energy on you. No one but a psychopath would wave a T-bone steak in the face of a caged, starving dog without giving him any, so why would you treat a man this way? Here’s my advice to women on the art of rejection: If you get the vibe that a guy is into you and you aren’t into him, you need to tell him immediately. It may not be a very pleasant confrontation, and it may entail missing the opportunity to bilk him out of favors, gifts, and free dinners, but it’s the right thing to do. The only alternative is to take pride in being a taker, a user, and a black hole from which no money can possibly escape.

2. The cock-blocker. Yes, your hot friend is special and deserves someone just as awesome as her. That doesn’t give you the right to make her decisions for her. You are not her goalie. Stop the shit-talking behind the back, slandering, and rumor-spreading. It only makes you look jealous of your friend’s attractiveness. It’s Jesus’s job to judge people, not yours. Also, your friend’s taste in men is not yours. Don’t let your personal bias chase the guys who are HER type away and only allow the guys who are YOUR type to have a chance. Truly caring about someone means helping them get what THEY want, not what YOU want for them. And if you think I’m “not good enough” for your friend, you can tell me that to my face, kthnx.

3. The deceptive slut. “Monogamy” and “commitment” are not dirty words. Stop making fun of me or calling me cheesy because I’m a hopeless romantic looking for something serious with the right person. Stop trying to get me to lower my standards by manipulating my ego. Stop breaking up relationships and making people in the community even more jaded by heartbreak than they already are. Marriage is not about possession or ownership, it is about mutual respect for eachother’s feelings. How bout this: I will refrain from slut-shaming you and respect your right to be polysexual with other people like you, as long as you refrain from making fun of me for being a monogamist or not getting laid as often as you. Because guess what? There is more to life than getting laid! And while you’re at it, stop trying to corrupt the more reserved women who are my romantic opportunities!

4. The abrasive radical 3rd-wave feminazi. Yes, I support a woman’s right to choose. I also believe in equal pay for equal work, gender equality under the law, and the abolishment of gender roles. Don’t mistake my disparaging of feminazis to mean that I don’t respect feminism. I’m a liberal, and all liberals, by definition, are feminists. But sadly, not all feminists are liberals. Once, this chick I knew told me she was afraid of her black roommate because she “didn’t want to get raped” (Her words, not mine). Then there is the materialism and classism rampant in the common female attitude. A woman who builds her own fortune is doing feminism right; a woman who marries for money is a trophy of a fascist empire and has been co-opted by a patriarchal system. If you are a feminist, but also a materialist, classist, and racist, please, don’t call yourself a liberal. It makes real liberals look bad. Conservative feminists who find Ayn Rand’s female protagonists inspiring are not feminists. They are feminazis, and their existence speaks to the phenomena of liberal special interests coming into conflict with the core values of liberalism. Liberalism is all about compassion, open-mindedness, equal opportunity, loving and aiding the downtrodden, and social inclusion, so if you aren’t about all that you aren’t a liberal.

Now, I’m all for smashing the patriarchy. Most women don’t realize that “male privilege” only applies to gender normative males. Not all males are privileged. So it would be more proper to call it “real man” privilege. Patriarchy is not rule by males, but rule by alpha males, and beta males suffer just as much as women under patriarchy. However, institutionalizing systemic emasculation and replacing patriarchy with matriarchy is a practice that turns you into the very monsters you had originally set out to fight. You are liberated now. Because, by definition, equality and privilege cannot coexist, female liberation effectively puts an end to chivalry. That means, you can hold your own doors, buy your own meals, and why not try asking a man out sometime instead of running passive-aggressive games like playing coy? Any man who does these things for you is just putting on a contrived display in a lame attempt to get in your pants, anyway. If you were smart you would find it a patronizing, sycophantic insult to your intelligence. And if you want to be treated with the respect of an equal, then live up to it. Stop blowing the rape whistle every time you want the men to come help you.

5. The newly-minted armchair Eastern mystic. I hate hippie-critical, self-serving advice. Don’t tell me to find happiness within if you haven’t spent as much time alone as I have. Don’t tell me I have a sense of entitlement if you haven’t lived as austerely as I have. Don’t tell me to find fulfillment in helping others if you haven’t sacrificed as much for causes as I have. Eastern mysticism is so vague that I often see it misinterpreted by westerners in ways that showcase their own selfishness, shallowness, and stupidity. This is a disgusting travesty. And it’s always some really super-rich Trustifarian suburbanite. Of course it’s easy for you to find inner peace from your ensconced position of wealth and comfort, carried on the backs of an over-exploited working class. It’s cool that you attended a few yoga classes and read ‘Be Here Now’ in college, but I was actually raised by a Zen Buddhist, so chances are, there isn’t much new information you are going to be able to tell me about it. And if you want to see who would make a better Buddhist monk, I’m willing to bet I can go for longer without sex than you can, and I’m probably a better kung-fu fighter than you as well. Namaste, bitch.

6. The hypocrite. I find that many women tend to hold double standards in their world view, and are hypocrites who seem incapable of rationality. I know so many women who think female gender roles are oppressive, and yet they still have all these preconceived notions in their heads about how a man should behave. Stop. If you don’t make 100k a year, have a proper height to weight ratio, and zero baggage, then don’t expect these things from a man. If you don’t want men to shame you for your sexuality, then don’t shame us for ours. Be logically consistent in your personal philosophy. I can’t speak for all men, but I find irrationality to be a huge turn-off, mostly because in my experience, hypocrites will usually end up flaking out or screwing you over for reasons that make sense only to them. And if you need a course on rationality, here’s a good start: Top 20 Logical Fallacies

7. The friend-hopper. If you’ve been in a relationship with a guy, the worst possible thing you can do is bang his friends when you are done with him. How would you like it if one of your exes made the rounds with your girl friends? That shit turns brother against brother, man! Uncool. How about this advice: Men tend to hang out in packs, so get to know the whole group first and decide which one you want most. This should all be a part of that ‘getting to know you’ phase before sex happens.

8. The uncouth rejector. When a man makes an unwanted pass at you, you don’t have to be a bitch about rejecting him. Slapping him in the face, calling him names, avoiding the confrontation altogether, or or getting one of your friends to talk to him on your behalf… These are all just rude, socially irresponsible, and immature ways to manage your social life. Instead, be flattered and take it as a compliment that someone likes you, even if the feelings aren’t mutual. You won’t always have to endure unwanted advances. With time, your looks will inevitably fade, and you will come to miss the days when it was easy to pick up men. So be gentle but firm, tell him there is someone out there for him, it just isn’t you. Have you ever spent weeks working up the courage to make an advance on someone, only to be harshly and painfully rejected? I didn’t think so. Men have feelings too, so be respectful of them.

9. The catty bitch who is unsympathetic to the socially frustrated. Look, existing social convention makes it a lot easier for a woman to get laid or even just make friends than a man. No one is trying to impress us or make us feel special, invited, or included. Your inbox may be full of opportunities, but for most men, the only opportunities that exist are the ones we make for ourselves. So don’t blame us just for trying. Your position is not ours. We can’t just sit there looking pretty waiting for someone to buy us dinner. We actually have to try, or else nothing will ever happen and we will die alone. So instead of admonishing a guy just for being pro-active about his social life, why not help him out? Introduce him around. Invite him to social functions. Give him good advice. Tell him what he’s doing wrong with women. Just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean someone else won’t. One girl’s trash is another girl’s treasure.

In my experience, women are always saying “let’s just be friends”, but attractive women tend to make terrible friends. If you’re going to be “just friends” with someone, why not actually BE a friend? In other words, be helpful and supportive instead of turning a cold shoulder. Don’t be socially negligent. This is how communities are built. Do you want to live in a cruel and uncaring, dog-eat-dog world, or do you want to live in a society?

10. The poser. There’s nothing I hate worse than someone who pretends to be something they are not. Relationships need to be based on a foundation of truth, not lies and phony posturing. Yes, I know that I’m ridiculously good-looking, but that is no reason to lie to me just to get me to like you. So often in dating, the possibility of sex causes honesty to go out the window. This is no way to build a lasting, functional relationship. So if you’re not REALLY into punk rock, comic books, libertarian socialism, or whatever, do me a favor and just tell me. I won’t be offended. To each his own. What are YOU into? I’d love to know. Being yourself is so much sexier than trying to fit in with something that isn’t really you.

11. The friend zoner. Just because you have known someone for a bit, don’t ever rule out the possibility that he might eventually want more than friendship with you. Some guys just like to get to know someone for awhile before they would even consider dating her. Believe it or not, men are just as wary of trusting the wrong person and getting hurt as women are. Some people find friendship to be a better way to get to know someone than dating. Just because a man doesn’t want to cold call someone he just met and barely knows in the name of avoiding ‘the friend zone’ doesn’t mean you should put him in that category. Do you like being categorized and put in boxes you can’t break out of? Neither do we.

12. The conceited porn star attitude. So you’re hot. Everyone likes your pics on Facebook. Your calendar is full of dates and your inbox is full of bad pick-up lines from horny guys. That’s great. But guess what? The earth still revolves around the sun. Your lifespan is just an eye-blink in the trillions of years the universe has existed. There are people who have accomplished more than you, and that has made them wealthier, more famous, and more respected than your pretty face ever will. And though one day your looks will inevitably fade, the rich will always be rich and the intelligent will always be intelligent. So take it all with a grain of salt. In the end, kindness and social conscience will always be more attractive than a selfish bitch with nice boobs. Narcissism and an obsession with make-up, fashion, and glorifying yourself at the expense of others will cancel out any physical attractiveness you may have.

13. The player-chaser. Some women are dumb enough to think that if a guy gets a lot of girls, this makes him more attractive. This reasoning is extremely flawed. Just because a man bangs a lot of chicks doesn’t mean he is somehow ‘better’ in bed or relationships than a guy who keeps his count low and spends a lot of time single. What it really means is that the women players are with are stupid and easily manipulated, and he is a lying douchebag. Think of it this way: the best lovers are usually the worst pick-up artists, because they don’t have to do it very often. Their skill is in keeping women, not winning them. Conversely, the guy who is terrible in bed is always having to pick new women up, so his skill as a pick-up artist is more developed than his skill in bed or relationships. If he were any good, he wouldn’t have to go out trawling for chicks all the time, because he would be able to keep one happy for longer than five minutes. The very idea that you should go after a man who already has more action than he can handle, while ignoring the guy who has been single for awhile, is akin to saying that a thriving plant should get more water than a dying plant, because the thriving plant “deserves” the water more. When in reality, it’s the dying plant that needs more water.

14. The hive-mind. You don’t have to agree with your girlfriends about everything, or constantly depend upon them for advice. Learn to think independently, and develop your own opinions. The sisterhood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and is probably holding you back as an individual. Women tend to be extremely cut-throat with each other, and you shouldn’t trust them just because they share your genitalia. It’s just asking to be exploited by people who call you their friends. Also, fashion trends and chick magazines like Cosmo are not always right. Just because something is popular does not make it right. A million people could be convinced that 2+2=5, but that doesn’t make it so.

15. The breeder. As much as you swear to yourself and everyone that you don’t want kids, a hormonal change in your brain chemistry will eventually give you the urge to breed. But that doesn’t mean you should. The Earth is already overpopulated and if this trend continues, we will eventually outbreed our capacity to provide for the entire population, turning life into a living Hell for the human race. So maybe you should learn to control your hormonal drives, just as you demand that men control theirs. Also, a woman’s choice shouldn’t be a man’s responsibility, so be prepared to take care of the kids you decided to have, without the father’s help.

16. The emotionally detached and insensitive. There are women who are going to read this and say. “Quit Whining”. Well, there were women’s rights protestors at my state’s capitol all month all up in arms about new restrictions on abortion. Is that what they were doing? Whining? This is another way of disarming the arguments of men who stand up for their rights: Attacking the ego by calling it whining. Or saying something like: “Your neediness is such a turn-off.” Well guess what , honey? Your emotional unavailability isn’t very attractive either! Maybe you don’t want to date a “whiner”, but I don’t want to date a psychopath who is detached from her own emotions and tries to manipulate my ego in order to get me to “be a real man” and “tough it out”, which really just translates to “enduring your bullshit”.

17. The woman who refers to herself or others as ‘high maintenance’. Isn’t that a little insulting to your cause? Shouldn’t women be able to maintain themselves? Isn’t implying otherwise kind of… I dunno… sexist? Misogynistic? Or is it only cool to abolish sexism when it doesn’t serve your interests? Quit upholding patriarchal attitudes when they work for you. Like “only speak when spoken to”. And stop fucking all the alpha guys who run that patriarchal system you are supposedly against!

18. The projector. Women seem to love the false consensus effect. Stop applying your personal struggles to my life. What is good for you might not be good for me. Not everyone has the same problems you have, so the lessons you’ve learned may not be applicable to them. And stop preaching at me the lessons YOU need to learn!

19. The selection/participation biased. If there’s one thing I would impart to young, beautiful women, it’s simply this: with your physical appeal alone, you will only attract horny douchebags. In order attract smart, sensitive guys that will actually treat you well, you need to put effort into being attractive on a mental level. Otherwise, you will come off as a bimbo, which will scare the good guys away, and your pool of applicants will tend towards the coarse and the perverted, which will color your experiences with men in such a way as to give you a horrible impression of them. So it’s not really that all men are pigs, it’s that you are incapable of engaging the classy guys on an intellectual level, which makes them think you will be unable to meet their mental and emotional needs. Sometimes, a good guy will sink to playing bimbo games if he thinks its the only way to connect with a girl he really likes, but he will still end up treating you like a cheap slut because you will have given him the impression that this is what you want. Simply put, act like a bimbo, get treated like one.

20. The shallow and superficial. Most people don’t give a shit about social justice. They only care about their own gratification. Fuck those people. They don’t believe in anything. They are human garbage. Consumers. Machines. To be human is to rise above the animal nature that society placates with bread and circus, and fight for a cause with your higher rationality. So many times I hear from women: “I only do things that are positive.” But in sticking to positivity, haven’t you detached yourself from reality? Just like Dr. King said: “Only love can drive out hate”, but in a lassiez-faire society, those who are “too negative” or “haters”, “Don’t deserve love”, which is a ridiculously cowardly and self-reinforcing way to avoid social responsibility. I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in dating someone with a false standard of reality, who has no social conscience.

21. The pimp for their friend that no one else wants. Yes I’m single. Yes it’s been awhile. No, I don’t want to bang your fat, dumb, ugly friend. Or a single mom. Or a prostitute. I don’t even like strip clubs. I will never be that desperate. Don’t insult me by suggesting I should hook up with anyone less than an equal. It is my sincere belief that the fat, ugly, stupid, and single parents belong together. I try to be realistic, but at the same time, I need someone who is at bare minimum on par with my own level. And it seems the longer I am alone, the stronger and more self-supporting I become. I’ve been in enough relationships to know that they can take a lot of work and be a major pain in the ass, so my standards tend to go up every day. Why would I go to all the trouble of cultivating a romantic relationship with someone to whom I am not attracted? I’m old enough to know what I like and what I don’t like! I want someone who is worth the trouble that relationships entail, and I’m not willing to settle for anyone else.

And that’s it. Sorry if my list was offensive. I don’t really care if 99.99% of women hate my guts for saying all this stuff, because I only need one woman on planet Earth to like me. Preferably a natural blonde or readhead with a nice body, who shares my values, priorities, and interests, and is reasonably intelligent. The rest of you can go fuck yourselves for all I care. I don’t want to be popular with women, I just want the one who is right for me.

Since it’s election time, I’ll just come right out and say that Alex Jones, Ron Paul, the Tea Party, Libertarians, Republicans, banksters, organized crime, and the Illuminati are all facets of the same fascist organization. They are the richest people in the world or their loyal servants. This owner class controls the media, means of production, natural resources, and most of the government.

The number one fear these people have is that some day, regular people might start a grass roots movement and take back the government. The government is the one viable and legitimate threat to the wealthy’s power. If the government worked for the people instead of capital, it could completely destroy the false class structure that works so hard to protect itself in the private sector. And so these wealthy fascists spend a lot of money trying to influence the underground political scene and shift it to the right, ideologically, as much as possible.

I have witnessed this in Anonymous, which began as an apolitical anarchist discussion/hacktivist group. Then, cointelpro agents in the form of guys who literally get paid to surf the net all day, injecting pro-establishment propaganda into internet discussion, tried to infiltrate the group and shift it to the right, but only succeeded in causing a schism in the group: All the anons with computer skills became the super-progressive, futurist, trans-humanist, collectively omniscient entity that is seen online, whereas the Anons without hacking skills became the Guy Fawkes mask-wearing Occupy protestors who always want to talk to you about Ron Paul. This is reflective of the tendency for technocrats and people with tech skills to hold very liberal political ideals, whereas the more libertarian protestors who smoke dope and go to orgies will always be capitalists at heart, because of their fondness for dealing drugs and cheap sex. And so, the disorganization that is Anonymous split into two groups: one that is left-anarchist, and one that is right-anarchist.

We can also see this happening with Alex Jones, a man who blames the New World Order for everything wrong in the world, and yet is surely on it’s payroll. Remember that one of the Illuimanti’s primary methodologies for maintaining its rule by secrecy is to deliberately spread misinformation about itself, and I believe that Alex Jones is the agent charged with this purpose. He is simply part of the fascist propaganda wing’s effort to make people distrust the government instead of seeing it as a tool that could be used for positive change.

Ron Paul’s campaigns are merely a way for the financial establishment to take the spirit of rebellion, which will always exist as long as there is oppression, and put that anarchic energy towards their own ends. We saw this with the Tea Party, which began as a grass roots movement, and was soon co-opted by the mainstream GOP. The monied power-structure will always try to bend anarchist organizations to its own sinister agenda. I hope that everyone realizes that a vote for any right-wing politician is a vote for earth polluting, working class-robbing, coke smuggling, gun-running, money laundering WAR CRIMINALS.

Did you know that you live in a racist society?
Did you know you’re the privileged class,
and everybody else is essentially taking it up the ass?

Did you know that you could be free?
Did you know it’s not the way that it has to be?
Did you know you can still change everything?

Did you know that there’s no such thing as equality,
and there might never be if you don’t change?

Did you know that you live in a war zone culturally?
Did you know that your parents were fucked
when they taught you how to fear anybody who wasn’t white enough?

Did you know that you could be free?
Did you know it’s not the way that it has to be?
Did you know you can still change everything?

Did you know that the older you get
it gets easier to blame somebody else for your own mess?

Did you know that the Jews don’t run the world,
and all black men aren’t criminals?

Did you know there’s a lot of money to be made
from keeping you paranoid, suspicious, worried, frightened
all wound up and tense inside, ’cause

Big business runs the government,
and it’s not good business
if we burn down the government.

So they keep us occupied with moron TV shows,
and shitty beer that wipes out brain cells,
and whining about Congress
and stupid fucking income taxes.

And if that’s not enough
to keep your mind off of
the way you’re getting dicked around,
they fill you with fear and hate,
give you someone to blame
for all your problems.

Why’s the country going
down the fucking toilet?

Do you know what they think of you?
Do you know how contemptuous they are of you?
Do you know how easy you are to fool?

You’re like a dog going after a ball that was never thrown.
Well guess what? You’re on your own.
Good luck.” – Screeching Weasel, Racist Society

Sometimes I wonder if it were even possible for God to express itself fully through a single human being, which leads me to reject the idea of God as anything other than the totality of all things. Personally, I believe that Jesus has reincarnated several times and each one of his incarnations has served to fulfill a part of his agenda. There is also the possibility that Jesus split himself into several souls and they are all here at once. But I don’t see how the omnipotent rapture-Jesus foretold by Revelations is possible.

If Jesus came down from heaven in all of his glory, he wouldn’t be able to define himself as human, because if he tried, everyone would be pissed off at him.

If he came back as a man, the women would be pissed.

If he came back as a white man, the blacks would be pissed.

If he came back beautiful, the ugly people would be pissed.

If he came back heterosexual, the gays would be pissed.

If he came back as an anarchist, the government would be pissed and probably do something stupid like nail him to another tree.

If he came back as a fascist, everyone would be pissed.

If he came back as a new-age hippie guru, the church would be pissed.

If he came back as a Democrat, the Republicans would be pissed.

There is no circumstance in which he could come back that wouldn’t piss someone off, possibly starting a war. Jesus himself, probably the most peaceful person ever, has been the motivation behind plenty of wars, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, and on into the modern age.

Like old Abraham Lincoln said, “You can please some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.” This world is so divided, how could one person of one nationality, race, sex, and creed ever hope to lead it?

Jesus wants to please everyone. That’s why he generally tends to stay off this lousy rock. Its impossible to please anyone here because you are all bigots with your own idea of what is right and what is wrong. If Jesus tried to come back to this planet at the state its in now, he would inevitably piss a lot of people off, because he wouldn’t be anything they expected or were hoping for.

The fact of the matter is, it is logically impossible for Jesus to please everyone because everyone has conflicting agendas. How is it possible for someone who has to be everything to everyone to have his own identity? And indeed, the first time he came, he most certainly did not please anyone and in fact created a lot of conflict and pissed a lot of important people off by revealing everyone’s petty scams and trifling cons to the world, even at the highest levels of ‘society’. And ultimately everyone became so heavily invested in lies that they felt like they had to get rid of the one guy who was faithful to the truth.

People of the earth don’t like peace. They like war. They don’t like charity. They like mindless self-indulgence. How are you going to attract a soul of peace and charity when you are all a bunch of greedy assholes? Why would Jesus ever want to come back? On a planet this greedy, he would probably attract more haters than Obama, Justin Beiber, and Octo-mom combined.

And think of how Jesus would be exploited in the modern age. Companies would want endorsements. Someone would try to get him to do a porno. The military might try to turn him into a weapon. The Feds would try to use him as a spy. The mafia would set up a gambling racket around his behavior. Every country on Earth would want him to claim allegiance to their nation. Every loser on the planet would feel like he owed them something because of a bunch of false promises made by writers who never even met the man.

It’s like that scene in RoboCop 2 where the corporation that owned RoboCop was trying to re-program his brain to make him ‘better’, but ultimately corporate committee thinking just created a logically indecipherable chunk of code that wouldn’t compile!

So, in the end, if Jesus ever came back, I think he would probably reject Government, Religion, Big Business, and Society and just move into a shack in the woods and play guitar or something. I can’t claim to know the mind of God, but I know good people because I am one. From my point of view, what humans call ‘society’ is, in actuality, just a bunch of selfish people manipulating each other, and really, I don’t want any part of it. And I’m pretty sure that Jesus, Lao Tzu, and a lot of other holy wise men would probably agree.

Anti-Fashion has its genesis in oppression. Austin aside, the South has never been kind to the punk scene. Being a punk in Dallas, for instance, meant being starved out by corporate employers, harassed and possibly beaten by police, and socially shunned by polite society. Thus, it was pragmatically impossible for punk fans and even the musicians themselves to express themselves through fashion in the typical ways most punks do.

In the late 80’s and early 90’s in Dallas, punk/skinhead skirmishes were causing such a ruckus in Deep Ellum that it was deemed a problem by the municipal government. Police action was initiated to resolve the situation and restore commerce to the Arts district. The police analyzed the situation and decided to side with the skinheads. This came as no surprise as many of the cops were skinheads themselves or related to skinheads somehow. When Terrel Bolton was made Chief of Police in 2004, I remember a lot of cops quitting because they didn’t want to work for a black man. It was a big deal.

And so, neon hair, mohawks, spikes, chains, and certain t-shirts were unofficially illegal in Dallas, and slowly all the punks were run out of town, often violently. Dallas literally had a fashion police, which is a testament to how one-dimensional the people who run that shithole are. The most extreme-looking people were ostracized and only the fashion moderates survived. Some of them retreated to the suburbs, and I came into contact with a group of them in Richardson, Garland, and Greenville in the mid/lateish 90’s. I had always been interested in punk music as a child, which drew dubious stares from my parents when I told them I wanted to grow a mowhawk. Luckily for them the mainstream music scene kept me from hearing any real punk until the early 90’s, when Kurt Cobain’s name dropping in interviews started cluing hopelessly uncool yuppie larvae suburbanites like me into what real punk music was.

The mid and late 90’s brought a punk revival of sorts. Since original hardcore artists had influenced so many grunge rockers, people started becoming interested in it again. Bands like Operation Ivy, Rancid, and NoFX were starting to blow up. The older peeps who had been punks in the 80’s thought it was cute to see teenagers dying and spiking their hair, and dressing like punks, but were quick to warn us that we wouldn’t be winning any praise from the powers that be. Knowledge of punk music was not hoarded or kept secret, indeed anyone who wanted to learn about it was warmly accepted by old gutterpunks, trying to keep their scene alive.

They dressed in a style which was pretty generic to the time, I guess what you would call ‘alternative’ or ‘grunge’. They didn’t really have a style. They had bands and parties, and played punk music but never called it punk. Rather than call a punk band a punk band, they just called it ‘a band’. Most of these old punks were just as into Primus, Soundgarden, and Screaming Trees as they were into Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, and the Circle Jerks. As a scene, it seemed to be the ‘last stop’ for a lot of them, as many of them were older and started dropping out of the party scene, mostly due to kids, career, etc… I didn’t ever even really consider it a ‘scene’, per se: there were no real venues, and most performances were at keggers in back yards. It was really just hanging out with co-workers and people I met that shared my obscure taste in dead music. Nobody was trying to set the world on fire, nor would it have been wise for anyone to make such an attempt. Rock venues did not book local punk bands, so true fans performed on private residences or in dive bars, ‘just for the lulz’. Shows were often all-ages so that older folks could bring their kids.

We certainly didn’t have an Emo’s, Red 7, or Mowhak’s. Instead we had Brian’s garage and Billy’s backyard. We had the filthiest little shoebox venues like the Palladium and the Galaxy, where the stage was made of plywood spray-painted black, and it shook so hard when we moshed, I sometimes thought it would collapse. This was back in the days when the Stagehand Union was still going and a lot of the guys I knew were running lights and sound for big acts as a means of paying the bills and keeping their own little local scenes alive. There were only a few places in town where freaky-looking people could get a job, the Stagehand Union was one and Whole Foods was another. I worked for both companies at one point or another.

This was the era of the Late 90’s Jock/Freak feuds and fights. For us it wasn’t so much skinheads we had to worry about, as in the 90’s, racism wasn’t that overt. It was really just jocks and rednecks that would fuck with anyone who looked freaky, be they punks, goths, hippies, or even ravers. The jocks basically considered themselves a gang. There would often be Jock/Freak group fights on the football field after school, with one side squaring off against the other. One punker kid even got his eyes gouged out, was blind for the rest of his life, and the police didn’t even do shit about it! They were just like: “Boys will be boys.”

And so I always saw the Dallas scene as truly underground. The people who were into punk did so with great caution and at great personal risk and expense. It wasn’t a great way to make friends and most people either wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about or look down on you for being into it. There was no need for backbiting, cliquishness or elitism, because the social environment was just so shitty for punks already. The tendency was to stick together and be helpful to eachother. Although I was too young to have been subjected to police brutality, I have gotten in fistfights over fashion, much in the same way that gangsters get shot over flying the wrong colors on the wrong block. I certainly lost more than a few job opportunities due to being blacklisted for my punk-inspired progressive politics, so sticking together with like-minded individuals was often necessary for employment and survival. New members to the scene were welcomed if only for the benefit of strength in numbers.

But it was never a dominant scene and Dallas became better known for it’s prog-metal and rave scenes, the latter of which eventually coming under fire and being hunted into extinction as well, which is a whole other tale. But when I look at the modern punk scene, it is strange to me. Its like a retro revival of the early/mid 80’s. The fashion is so vibrant and alive, the people so juvenile, the politics so trifling, it startles me. I guess in Austin, anyone with the money to buy the clothes, tickets, and drugs can be a punk. But in Dallas, it was a hard-fought victory just to survive. The Austin scene survives and flourishes because the police and money are tolerant of it. If there were a crackdown, it would be too soft to survive.

So, young whipper snappers, go back to Westlake and dye your hair, wear your recently-purchased vintage punk gear. I don’t know who you are trying to impress with your derivative music, over-priced drinks, and “friends”. But I remember a time when people paid in blood for their tastes and their politics, only to grow up, become a regular working stiff, move to trendy, Hollywood-ized Austin and get hated on by a bunch of fashionistas, holier-than-thou sanctimonious liberals, and scenesters. Sorry I don’t respect your quiet derision, behind-the-back shit talking, and cock-blocking. I used to get beaten up and starved because I shared your taste in music and politics, so I really could not care less who you are connected to or whether or not you think I’m cool enough to be here. If anything, you should respect me if you were at all genuine about what you profess to believe.